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Why is DNS still hard to learn?

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Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#91

Post by arjvik »

shon wrote: post #2

It’s not. It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed much and it’s operation is fairly straightforward. dig is a little confusing. It’s more capable but less straightforward than good old nslookup (which still works fine BTW). I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. For example, today wifi routers “just work” right out…

Is configuring BIND hard just because it's got an obtuse zone and configuration format? Or because there are a lot of DNS-server-level decisions that need to be made?

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#92

Post by monksy »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #31
monksy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to add on to what you're saying: > I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. I've noticed it's become much worse since universities have been teaching Python to start with and with the whole aggressive comodization of developers. To some extent the social justice polices inacted in our communities to exclude peo…

I may agree with your point but don't understand the social justice aspect at all; makes it feel like it's something just added in. I think both our perspective as a society and thereforo educational goals have changed over decades, laterally to any social justice aspect. If nothing else, there are order of magnitude more developers of all sorts today than 25 years ago, both as absolute numbers and as relative percen…

The SJ part I gave more context in a reply to: Spivak

But to address the level of statements: I see SJ as one part of it, not the only or major part.

> enthusiastic nerds

Maybe it's the spaces I'm in but I'm not seeing that these days. I'm not hearing about personal projects people have made anymore. I'm not seeing a lot of enthusiastic young presenters at conferences etc. I'm just seeing younger people trying to stand out in the rat race and they aren't similar to when I was growing up. (I.e. lan parties, identifying as nerdy people and grouping together, etc).

The last young person I recall being like that was a guy who did a presentation on using Joycons at Scaladays 2017? This was a kid that did have experience in the us first robotics group. But f me.. a high schooler pretty good at Scala.. that's awesome!

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#93

Post by dclowd9901 »

msie wrote: post #86
bratgpttamer wrote: post #14

I feel like DNS is one of the more straightforward protocols, especially on a practical level, and especially given that most interfaces are a dropdown and two text boxes. I have noticed a lot of developers shy away from it, probably because they don't use it much or it's not their job (rather than it being hard).

Exactly. Why waste time learning something I will only use once or twice a year or 10 times in my career? Or that someone else (who is an expert) can fix for me?

I guarantee the problem space that dns solves is something you will run into in your career. Best to have some knowledge of systems like that so you can design them.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#94

Post by dv_dt »

shon wrote: post #2

It’s not. It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed much and it’s operation is fairly straightforward. dig is a little confusing. It’s more capable but less straightforward than good old nslookup (which still works fine BTW). I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. For example, today wifi routers “just work” right out…

DNS concepts are pretty straightforward, but I agree with the article that there are a lot of little holes to fall into. No mention in any thread on dig vs /etc/hosts. Or of ISPs with bad actor DNS behavior... etc..

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#95

Post by fullstop »

1bent wrote: post #42

djbdns is simple, easy to understand, easy to configure; it embodies a clear understanding of how DNS works. Unlike BIND and dig, it was designed after DNS had been in use for a while. Like sendmail, BIND suffers from being designed before anyone knew what it would need to do.

I still use tinydns, but I've moved on from dnscache to unbound.

djbdns was a great tool, clearly built with security in mind, and it forced you to understand how the whole system worked. It struggled with things added later like txt and srv records but they could still be added.

qmail was also well ahead of its time.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#96

Post by antonjs »

josho wrote: post #73
tristor wrote: post #30

I don't agree with this article. I think DNS is something few people take the time to learn, but it's not actually hard to learn. One of the great things about DNS is that the system itself will tell you about it's internal state in response to queries. It's very easy to inspect a DNS server for a known zone and understand how it works, and there's very good tooling that's free and widely available to do this (like d…

If you read the article the author points out why it's hard to learn. The concept is easy, but when teaching the concepts we don't include all the details of the modern internet. As an example what are the rules that your browser uses to cache and expire DNS entries? Are those rules consistent between browsers?

And does your browser have settings which bypass or supplement the host's DNS configuration. Secure DNS (DoH etc) is great, but damn that's confusing when you first run across it. Not to mention how phones do it; you can't override a DoH DNS server when connecting to a VPN which offers internal DNS on Android, for instance.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#97

Post by haroldp »

shon wrote: post #2

It’s not. It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed much and it’s operation is fairly straightforward. dig is a little confusing. It’s more capable but less straightforward than good old nslookup (which still works fine BTW). I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. For example, today wifi routers “just work” right out…

Can you help me find the mistake in my zone file?

  $ORIGIN example.net.
  $TTL 900
  @    IN    SOA    ns1.example.com. hostmaster@example.com. (
        20230728001
        1800
        300
        3600
        172800
    )
  @    IN    NS      8.8.8.8.
  @    IN    NS      8.8.4.4.

  @    IN    CNAME example.com.
  @    IN    MX    10    172.253.124.27
  www  IN    CNAME example.com

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#98

Post by tux1968 »

knome wrote: post #51
jeroenhd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is hard to learn... using the tools people used to learn DNS with. BIND is great at what it does, but its configuration files suck and its manual is long, terse, and unnecessarily complex sometimes. Dig is powerful, but abbreviates everything like we're on an 80 column terminal. At times Wireshark was a better tool debugging DNS issues than Dig was. Give someone PowerDNS or another modern DNS server and I…

>I don't know what the semicolons before the lines are supposed to convey but they're only making things confusing all of the lines that aren't part of the query answer are prefixed with semicolons. so it's basically a comment character. presumably to ease processing of the data it spits out. You know. So you can `dig google.com | grep -v '^;' | grep . | awk '{ print $5 }'` easily. I can imagine people using it in a…

> dig google.com | grep -v '^;' | grep . | awk '{ print $5 }'`

It wasn't really your point, but hopefully you'll forgive me sharing an equivalent one-liner, without grep:

dig google.com | awk '/./ && !/^;/ {print $5}'

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#100

Post by skrebbel »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #84
jeroenhd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I just wonder what the double semicolons mean and why they're different from single semicolons :) It's fine, I can Google the answer, I just wished I didn't need to. I already know to use +short when I just want the result(s). I use it in a script to detect and resolve my Pihole's random freezes (by timing the lookup and rebooting the VM every time a lookup fails or takes longer than 200ms, janky but it works).

Perhaps there is info that would normally be present and isn’t, hence stacked semicolons.

A precision engineering tool shouldn’t make its users guess like that.
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