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Comment by runiq | Hacker News Reader

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runiq·

13. It's always DNS.

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"Why do people find DNS so difficult? It’s just cache invalidation and naming things."

https://twitter.com/jdub/status/739110670562557952

Related: Jeff of the Craft Computing YT channel has an alcoholic flask merch for sale with "In case of DNS" embossed on it:

* https://www.craftcomputing.store/product/hip-flask-in-case-o...

DNS is nice, it's the only internet protocol that "just works" and doesn't need tuning with obscure Linux-only system parameters.

Maybe it's because I don't use bind.

> Maybe it's because I don't use bind.

Windows AD is the worst culprit here. Most times when something breaks that can not possibly be linked to DNS, the AD is bridging the failure in some way.

That said, yeah, I'd bet the large majority of bind installations are broken too. It's just that DNS really resists failure, and the GP isn't exactly about when it fails.

Wow. That's the first time in my 25+-years on the internet I've ever heard someone say that dns "just works".

Wait till you find out about the cascading failure modes of TCP. You're in for the ride of your life.

I have run TCP/IP networks of thousands of machines before all the automated tooling that's around these days to make this not cause you to loose your sanity. I've seen many of the possible cascading failure modes there are to see at this point[1]. I stand by my claim that DNS is one of the most unreliable parts of the jenga tower though.

[1] eg the first time I had root on a unix box I accidentally advertised it as a gateway over bgp and had all the "outbound" tcp traffic for the business park our office was in and a small ISP coming into my box and timing out. Yeah bgp and routing protocols are also common causes of failure, but DNS is worse.

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