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rockban
4y

Why do we still speak in direct DNS?

I don't know about you, but I have observed so many DNS mishaps in my day, and also have observed that developers and non-devs consistently fail to have a succinct mental model of how to set DNS properly for a website.

There are lots of services that make setting DNS easier than ever, but I'm kind of surprised so many people still have to think directly in terms of CNAMES, APEX DOMAINS, and all the direct domain knowledge of DNS.

Can't we have a higher level abstraction that compiles to DNS with more safety guards? Sure, let me dip into DNS when I need to, but why are DNS settings tables still such a normal thing?

I write Ruby code so I don't have to write C code. I'm sure there are attempts in DNS abstraction, but the fact that I haven't come across them means they are probably still too leaky or just not mainstream.

Thoughts on the matter?

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  • 5
    4y
    I do not really understand what you see as a problem.

    For the simplest cases you can often use the built in solution of the service you use to publish the website.

    For any more than z simple a, cname an mx record you probably need more knowledge to know what you need, or you need to hire someone to plan that out.

    And also, DNS actually changes, new features being added, so a very hold your had gui would need to change regularly and I have so far not seen any one making a good enough one for anything but the very simplest problems.
  • 3
    4y
    What would you propose as the abstraction use cases? DNS is a relatively simple protocol made even simpler with Dynamic DNS...
  • 1
    4y
    Network Solutions and Cloudflare.
  • 1
    4y
    Well...

    DNS is extensible.

    And Zonefiles are very cumbersome.

    https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1035

    The updates alone are ... hard.

    NSD sums it up in an honest way:
    https://nlnetlabs.nl/documentation/...

    With the misusage of DNS as a general purpose configuration storage it became worse imho.

    Writing a layer on top of that is always messy, as there are lot's of internals that need to be known depending on what you have and what you want.

    Writing a clean zone file... Possible. Though TXT and IPv6 and DNS name validation can be tricky (TXT - encoding/parsing).

    Parsing Zonefiles... Oh boy. It will end in suicide depending on age and system(s).
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