Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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Not solved on LANs, ad-hoc local networks, virtual networks, or when DNS is down or broken.

This is not really an end-user issue but it is a serious usability issue for IT admins and developers. It's very very common to schlep around raw IPs constantly when messing with networks and I don't see that going away. It's also very important to be able to visually parse IPs when understanding the topology of a network, writing firewall rules or routes, etc.

This is a DX (developer experience) issue more than a UX (user experience) issue.

Edit: three specific problems with DNS:

(1) What happens when things are not configured yet?

(2) OSes are designed to have one DNS server but people belong to many networks either at once (local + VPN + virtual + ...) or serially via mobility. In reality you need many DNS servers, but then how do you deal with naming conflicts?

(3) DNS is dependent on IP so you can't use DNS to debug DNS issues. It's a circular dependency.

In practice IP schlep is very common.

Hostname discovery (mdns), etc solves it on local networks. If DNS is down or broken, it would be difficult for me to "use the internet", and I'd have to copy and paste a lot anyways.

So, run yet another service with a poorly thought out RFC and add another code base to my vulnerability monitoring?

At home/small business scale, yes. At enterprise scale, you shouldn't be relying on IP addresses for clients for anything important.

mDNS is slow and unreliable and on large networks it doesn't scale. I personally don't find it very useful since half the time it barely works even on wired LANs let alone big WiFi or distributed networks. It's also prone to naming conflicts (is this linux-1, linux-2, or linux-3?) and other OS configuration issues and is not secure.

On a network like that, wouldn't DDNS solve the problem?

I mean DDNS where the DHCP server tells the DNS server which IP has what hostname, not e.g. dyndns.

I don't think people trust DDNS enough in corporate networks and any security sensitive network.

> ad-hoc local networks

Actually that's not a problem for that. Since people who are actually using them have no idea about IPv4, too and just copy addresses. Actually you could create local address with everything prefixed by fd + 40 bit which could be just fdff:ffff:ffff:ffff::1 which isn't really hard to remember.

Or, you know, when your friend is hosting a StarCraft game over TCP and you have to write their address. People don't have DNS addresses and even if your ISP has a mapping by default (usually to addr-x-y-z-w.isp.com), the OS doesn't show it.

On the other hand, DNS could fix this - just have a TLD of ip6 and have it resolve all the examples in the article. It would require no changes to current software and will work transparently. I.e. you'd enter http://deadbeef.ip6:1234 and when the ip6 TLD servers receive a request for deadbeef.ip6, they will reply with dead:beef:0:0:0:0:0:0. Similarly with deadbeef.1.ip6 and so on. You could easily implement this in the OS too without much hassle and not even need servers on the internet to do it.

I see this idea like a really cool one.

http://deadbeed.ip6 would help to start using it.

If the local dns could be setup to autotranslate them to ip6 could help this notation to gain traction

Using a special TLD for IP6 addressing is the sanest proposal I've read here so far. Add the ip4 TLD while we're at it.

I just had this dystopian vision where a non-profit operated .ip6 to work as discussed then went defunct and a domain-grabber (named Network Solutions) bought it. Everybody scrambled to patch their recursive resolvers real fast :-)

If it catches on, I expect it to be built into every dns library so it does not even hit the network. The idea of grabbing the TLD and then redirecting to a middleman that inserts ads sounds quite profitable though...

Hosting Starcraft on a port open to the Internet sounds like a terrible idea. If you actually want to host a public server, then getting a dynamic domain name is not hard. If it's a private game, you're better off using a VPN, over which a broadcast discovery protocol can be used.

In any case, if you really need to, what's the problem with copy-pasting an address?

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