Show HN: A site to look up DNS records | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A site to look up DNS records

dnsrecords.io

82 pointsfreekmurze59 comments

So just `host -a whatever.com` with the addition that you're tracking me with Google Tag Manager and God knows what else in the backend?

I was expecting to see something like http://dnstrails.com <-- this one shows you historical data, which can be useful for checking the history of a domain before you buy it.

This website's UI is terrible. It automatically suggests domain names instead of let users to input themselves. So if ones' domain name extensions are short or not in their database, they can't provide you anything. For example: key in any .co domains, they'll search .com for you. What a shitty design.

Hi! I just came across this comment. There was a super annoying bug in the autocomplete of a new UI we launched this week. Can you do me a favor and shift-refresh and try again? Any other feedback is appreciated and will be implemented.

Drop me a note at chris at ueland com with any other feedback. Thanks for trying it out!!

I was planning on putting string manipulation functions like trim() in the cloud and masquerading it as something new and cool

asynchronous string manipulation API now available for Docker

You're still thinking too big. I give you, print/echo as a service.

Lets say you have a string, and want to print that string to the console.

Now you can use our groundbreaking SaaS offering, to make that easier.

Just pipe the string to our Patent-Pending service, we'll apply our secret sauce, and return back the string for you, so you can call print/echo as you wish.

Example:

    var="foo"

    print "$(curl -X -d "${var}" http://echo.io)"

It should communicate with a microservice on port 7 in a RESTful way.

A) No SSL?

B) Funny that echo.io is already registered

So someone else commented on this and was down voted, but let's try again.

This site literally wraps a shell command [1]:

    dig +nocmd example.com any +multiline +noall +answer

Wrapping shell commands into more usable services isn't necessarily bad. But this is a pretty crazy example.

This 'app' is 500K (500 thousand!) lines of PHP. To run one shell command.

1: https://github.com/spatie/dnsrecords.io/blob/master/app/Http...

A bit of an overkill indeed...

While I agree with the broader sense of what you are saying I agree, but counting the lines of code like that is a bit unfair. Yes there are many, even for an app, but the source code of your terminal and the commands that you use should also be counted by your logic.

You can only count the lines of code for my terminal if you also count the lines of code for the Browser.

The source code of the command in question (dig) also doesn't count, because their application literally calls the `dig` shell command. So they need not just those 500K lines of PHP (I didn't bother to count the CSS or JS) but they are also dependent on a shell (probably /bin/sh, which could be anything deepening on their host OS) AND the dig command itself.

You are mistaken in thinking that an ANY query will do what you want. ANY is not ALL; it does not return all records associated with a name.

I think you've grossly misunderstood my comment.

I'm not arguing about what command is used - I merely copied the command the site in question is using.

My comment is about the 1/2 million lines of PHP wrapped around that shell command, to present it as a site.

How is this "beautiful"? It's just the direct text of a database look up in a moderately nice font. I'd rather have a nice table layout without all of the programmer-y info in there on a white (or maybe slightly off-white) background with black (or very dark gray) text at a reasonable size, personally. To me the font and coloring is far less a part of the beauty than all the other crap that the database returns and that didn't get discarded or reformatted.

I don't know if the other info is useful to other people. But if so, perhaps you could have a few different "pages". One that gives all the DB stuff, and one that just prints the human readable stuff?

I think it's a nice project. I like the output format and the simplicity of it. But I too find the trend of describing one's own work as "beautiful" rather grating.

Was expecting something worthwhile. Was disappointing.

You could have made an nice ui with presents the information in a simple to understand way. Instead if showing stuff like seconds etc. you could have translated it into more understandable.

Instead of saying mx record, you could have used an email icon.

Not a technical person here.

I just check my personal site with this tool and see that is possible know that I use Google G Suite.

Is no way to opt out this? I'm more vulnerable to an attacker, right? They can try to login to my account on gmail.com.

I thought that for not using an email address like @gmail.com, etc. I had the advantage of hiding my login page XD

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid. Sometimes I have the idea that the Internet is not well designed from the ground up for privacy in mind. Recently I check the product Hotjar [0] and was amazed how creepy it is, you can see screen recordings of the users interacting with your site, where are they from, and more. I made a video about this [1] (spanish). Why by default the Internet is like that?, all those features should be opt in imho, with user consent. What do you think?

Excuse me if my wording is not perfect, my english is not the best :)

[0] https://hotjar.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDgybTvnhjY

hotjar keeps track of user actions, and replays the same. It doesn't record your screen.

Thanks for clarify that, with "screen recordings of the users interacting with your site" I mean what you describe ("track of user actions, and replays the same"), is not the same technically but is equally immoral for me, and that is one of the default default features that the Internet has by design from the beginning that I'm questioning, today a regular internet user just download a popular browser and is affected by that without knowing.

>today a regular internet user just download a popular browser and is affected by that without knowing.

Well, it's not technically a problem of the internet (the protocol of networked-communication between arbitrary machines), but specifically having a turing-complete language in the browser. The browser sandboxes the language to an extent (so you can't load a webpage and it goes and deletes all files on your computer), but it can't offer protection against any arbitrary program without being able to understand the goal of the program, and whether or not you as a user actually want that goal (or any of its sub-goals).

The problem comes down to: Freedom to act well is also the freedom to act poorly. The browser can't delete all your files, but it also can't organize your files for you. It can track your mouse position across the screen for the sake of recording it... but it can also track your mouse position for the sake of a game.

So it's really a question of how much do you actually want from the browser? Another alternative is to not give it a proper language at all, such that it can only do a predefined subset of behaviors (ie Web 2.0), and thus users are kept safe from any malicious behavior, but of course, at the cost of being kept from any "innovative" behaviors as well. Just fyi, you can enforce this rule if you'd like, by something like the noscript extension, to kill javascript everywhere (and optionally disable it for sites you trust). Half your webpages will break because developers assume javascript, and you can't play any games or fancy websites without opening yourself up to recording, but you'll be safe.

So the choice is yours: Self-impose limitations, or accept the risk.

Most people choose risk (by market-selection), though they may not have realized they ever made a choice, or understood it if they did.

That open my eyes in so many ways. Thanks for a detailed explanation. I didn't have time to elaborate on my thoughts about that right now.

Sorry for the late response, I hope this product had a notification feature and avoid have to be dependent on him accesing to check when someone responds to you.

>Is no way to opt out this? I'm more vulnerable to an attacker, right

Others can't send you a mail unless you publish those DNS records that say you use GSuite. Hiding your email host doesn't give you much in the way of security. If you're really concerned about security, see Google's Advanced Protection Program[0].

[0]: https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

I understand.

But I was thinking, a potential attacker receives an email from me (me@customdomain.com), with this tool, they can look up and see that I use G Suite and try to login on my account on gmail.com.

Thanks for letting me know about Google Advanced Protection Program.

With any other custom domain, they can do the exact same thing only it's on a smaller web server perhaps running different software (which may or may not be up to google's particularly high security)

Using a good password and two-factor authentication basically eliminates this issue. You are looking for what is called 'security through obscurity' which is never a solid defence plan over real, verified, security (like real encryption, proper passwords, multi-factor authentication, etc)

You are right. Thanks for let me know about 'security through obscurity', I'm reading the Wikipedia article now [0]. Yes, I'm using two factor and strong passwords (and encouraging people to do that, too).

Thanks for let me expand my knowledge through education.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

Very nice! I was just doing this for some domains yesterday on ad-laden, ugly as sin sites.

It would be nice if the page URL would update with each request and provide a copy-pastable link (e.g. https://dnsrecords.io/q/ycombinator.com).

Out of curiosity, why are you not just calling, say, `dig`?

At the time I was in Windows. I believe there is a Windows CLI command for this as well, but didn’t know it off the top of my head.

"nslookup" is the tool you'd use, under windows.

I normally use https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/#ANY/

But I liked your UI better.

Looks very nice, but instead of sending ANY queries it should just send multiple queries for different RRs, because ANY is deprecated by Cloudflare (and probably more services)

Agreed. I block ANY queries using iptables string filters. I also block anything other than NOERROR responses from myself. Their site doesn't work with any of my domains.

Interesting--I'd like to know more.

Would you please provide example command(s) of blocking both ANY queries and NOERROR responses that you've had relative success with?

Thanks!

Certainly!

  -A OUTPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 53 -m string --hex-string "|8500|" --algo kmp --from 30 --to 31 -j ACCEPT
  -A OUTPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 53 -m string --hex-string "|8400|" --algo kmp --from 30 --to 31 -j ACCEPT
  -A OUTPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 53 -j DROP

The above used in the filter table drops anything that does not match NOERROR recursive and NOERROR non-recursive responses.

  -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p udp -m udp --dport 53 -m string --hex-string "|0000ff0001|" --algo bm --from 40 --to 65535 -j DROP

The above used in the raw table drops "ANY". It could probably be optimized to search through less of the packet.

  -A INPUT -i eth0 -p udp -m state --state NEW -m length --length 24:120 -m udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT

Above is the inbound rule that blocks some overflow attempts.

Thanks a bunch.

I'll take a crack at implementing something similar, much appreciated!

No problem. If you run into issues, it could be that your particular DNS server may put the result code in a different part of the packet. If that is so, simply use

  tcpdump -p -i interface -NNnn -s0 -c100 -SeX port 53

and look for the 8400 and 8500 hex codes and what the number in the far left column is. Then adjust iptables accordingly to look in that part of the packet.

Another way to do this is to modify the source code of the DNS server, but I found that to be too time consuming.

Disclaimer: I should also add that the above method of using iptables to drop anything we do not know about does violate some RFC's and instead follows the thing our Mom's taught us, "If you don't have anything nice to say...". That said, you would have to decide if bending some RFC's is ok. In a Corporate environment it can lead to confusion and time lost troubleshooting.

If you're pretty new to software development, good job on making something.

Vulnerable to XSS.

<b onmouseover=alert('XSS')>click me!</b>

XSS implies that you can get this script to run for other users, not just yourself.

I suspect it would work the same if the script was stored in a TXT record for a domain being queried.

There is even a tool for this called dnsxss.

For whatever reason this reminded me of Zork. I tried several things without success:

open mailbox go house open window get lamp

nothing worked. You might consider adding a game too. That way people could play a game while looking up stuff.

I love retro tools like this, so I dig the look. But I agree with sigi45 that you could parse the information and display it in a more meaningful way, because as of now I can just pop over to a terminal and do the exact same thing. And whenever I input keygen.sh, it fails because ANY is deprecated by Cloudflare [0].

[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-happened-next-the-deprecati...

Same here, I dig the look and the feel. It seems very intuitive

ANY requests are considered harmful due the large response sizes (DNS amplification!).

Some DNS servers will truncate the response or refuse (like CloudFlare).

You're getting really mixed results here on HN, but personally, I love it for the "cool" factor. Would I use this? No, not really, I have an entire suite of command-line tools I'm familiar with already that don't require a browser.

But this is nice, it's pretty, and you've got a great domain name which you've put to great use.