Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "How DNS Works - Computerphile" video.

  1. Worth contrasting the telephone system, based on 19th century technology where you have to remember someone’s telephone number (or maintain a directory on your phone), versus the Internet, developed in the 20th century, where the network itself takes care of finding the numbers for you, you just have to remember their names. The mobile phone in your pocket is such an advanced piece of technology, yet when you make a call or send an SMS to someone, it still falls back to this 19th-century way of finding them through the network--by a number instead of a name.
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  2. One drawback with DNS A records, in particular, is that they only give you an IP address, not a port number. So they are not sufficient to identify a service, only a machine which might provide that service. This was remedied later with the introduction of SRV records, but they are not heavily used.
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  3. Yes, they do talk to ordinary nobody clients like you or me. In fact, a lot of their traffic is completely unnecessary, coming from misconfigured clients that should be sending their queries elsewhere. But they can’t block it.
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  4. Ah, is that why the limit.
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  5. Cloudflare also offers 1.1.1.1, in case you want to have an alternative to Google.
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  6. IPv4 or IPv6 makes no difference.
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  7. A distributed phone book that your phone knows how to look up, so you don’t have to. And that is maintained automatically by the network itself, so you don’t have to.
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  8. Nobody should be using such insecure technologies any more.
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  9. Funny, then, that the world is running out of IPv4 numbers (addresses), but there are still plenty of domain names to go around.
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  10. More likely you have/had /etc/nsswitch.conf, which lets you configure multiple sources for DNS (and other) data.
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  11. Yup. And in fact, the dnsmasq name server, which is designed for small setups like a home office, serves up exactly the contents of your /etc/hosts file, it doesn’t need (or understand) complex zone files like bind does.
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  12. Was NRS the equivalent of DNS SRV records rather than A records, then?
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