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Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

I love this. DNS is something that, if you're online and visiting websites or even sshing into boxes a lot of the time, you're using, unless of course you carry around a list of IP addresses like the olden times. It is one of the many things that underpin the modern web and we take it for granted.

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I missed the “you’re using” at first, and was about to ask why on earth you keep maintaining host lists :P

Totally agree, and at the same time, it’s so painful that there’s a nice haiku —

    It’s not DNS
    There’s no way it’s DNS
    It was DNS

Man, it hurts how hours of struggle and frustration can be summed up in a haiku. Beautiful.

> It was DNS

To be fair, sometimes it's BGP.

At least the haiku still works, though

I still have one IP address lodged in my memory from 25+ years ago - sable, the university's key Unix server for students, on which I learned so much about Unix and the 1990s Internet.

(I'm not sure if I'd faced DNS issues that meant I needed to know that - but it was a time when dialup ISPs told you what to manually configure for your DNS rather than it being automatically assigned, so it all seemed a bit chunkier.)

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