Create a DNS record for an IP address instantly | Hacker News Reader

Create a DNS record for an IP address instantly

ipq.co

107 pointsoceanician52 comments

Having it provide a button to fill in the user's IP (or perhaps doing so by default) might be useful.

extremely this... that takes down a huge barrier to entry for a totally trivial cost

Hmm... I can't see that being terribly useful. I think having it there as a default would be a distraction.

If anything, should be a button or something for "use my ip address". But I imagine the 95% use case being people with cloud servers, not trying to get a hostname for thier current computer's ip address.

What's wrong with leaving a default in there being your current IP? I think you're wrong in your assumption that people want to use something as transient as this for a server. If you have a server, you probably have a domain.

This is a great service for assigning a name to your home or office router and then using that for NATting in.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what exactly is appealing about this service and/or is new and innovative? It's trivial enough to put a web interface in front of BIND or djbdns to replicate this behavior to where I'm trying to understand why this got ranked highly? I am by no means bashing the creator of this service nor the service itself - I'd just like to understand what additional value is being provided here that does not already exist?

I've been using DNS, DNS Services, DNS Administration Services and DNS Configuration Tools for 12 years.

This is the first time I've ever seen a tool/web page that has done this so simply.

It may be trivial, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone do it before.

Oh, and the hacker value is very clear - if you notice there is (soon) going to be an update that will let you also update your DNS record.

It's clean, quick, and simple. Add the ability to submit updates via email, and you have a "posterous for DNS updates." :-)

You boot up an ec2 instance and want to give a domain name to a friend that isn't 100 characters long. How much effort does it take you setup your bind solution? Particularly if you've never setup dns before. Can I do this given that I'm not running any other servers? The popularity of dyndns should give you a sense of demand.

that being said you can do this for free @ dyndns with only slightly more effort

DynDNS now limits new accounts to only 2 free subdomains.

You say it's so trivial yet you didn't include a link to the one you just set up to prove your point :p So not quite that trivial, and that is often enough.

Quite often it is useful to be able to do something easily and quickly that you could have done before with more effort.

That's pretty interesting. Somewhat like DDNS, but not as useful?

I don't know if I want an ipq.co address, but I just realized - could I use my own DNS hosting (through slicehost, linode, whatever) to assign domain names to arbitrary IP addresses?

Like, if I own garlicgargle.com, and I have another system with a static IP, does that mean I can just assign salty.garlicgargle.com to that IP and it works fine? Sorry for the basic question, I guess I don't understand doing much with DNS beyond the common tasks.

Yes. It's called an A record.

It's called a different use of an A record than what I'm used to.

I'm talking about some totally unconnected system on a different network.

Seems kind of odd to me, what's stopping me from calling my own ip address google.com? I don't know what that would do for me, of course.

Like I said, I know that sounds pretty basic but it's a different way of thinking about this for me, i.e. I've realized I could give my home system, which has a static IP, a domain name that is a subdomain of one of our work computers, which would have been really handy like... last year.

Google's domain is pointed at Google nameservers.

If you point a domain you control to your own nameserver, you can direct it to any IP you want, on any network.

Aha, that's the catch. Thanks for the info.

Not necessarily a catch though. Many (most?) registrars and web hosts provide name servers free for their users (GoDaddy lets you do this for example). If you can add/edit DNS records can point a subdomain anywhere you like.

But, that doesn't mean I'm free to point evildomain.google.com to anywhere I prefer, right?

You can do that, but nobody believes your nameserver is authoritative for questions about google.com, so it will only affect someone whom you can persuade to use yours as their default nameserver. Everyone else who asks the "com" top-level domain nameservers who is authoritative for google.com is going to be sent to GOOG's nameservers, not yours, so names you define will be invisible to them.

Also, note that you could have google.evildomain.com - At least until you get a C&D order that is.

DNS is basically a big key-value store. You can point any domain or subdomain to any IP address.

Love the "once we implement it" for making updates, very lean.

I am not sure how I feel about this. A domain name implies ownership of the site.

It's kind of like reverse domain hijacking.

See, http://hackernews.ipq.co/

Am I missing something?

That won't work for virtual hosted web sites, which is most web sites, because the unrecognized host name in the Host header which will hit the default host on the target web server instead of the correct virtual host, unless that web server is configured to recognize the foo.ipq.co host name.

I don't think it implies ownership, but it could certainly mislead users who are not familiar with the purpose of DNS. It's always been trivial to point one of your own domain names at someone else's IP address (or create a CNAME), but this hasn't been the source of any major abuse that I'm aware of, probably because you don't have any control over the remote resource.

Other than the servers checking host per other people's comments, this is basically just how dns works... anybody with a domain can point any subdomain or domain they own to any IP they want. I can't see any practical way around this at the dns level.

On top of it I was able to create an account on hackernews.ipq.co version of hackers news called blahhah.

Maybe y-combinator doesn't care but I think I would!

Why should anyone care? You would do more damage by pointing to a fake site like countless phishing sites already in existence.

It's up to the web site owner to check HTTP Host.

You could equally have registered hakernews.com and CNAME'd it

I agree, web site owners should be checking the host. Most of them don't.

And yes I could easily create a CNAME record to do the same thing but you have to have a reasonable amount of knowledge to do so. Unlike this tool.

I disagree. Most HTTP configs I've seen use virtual hosts, which means that the correct Host header is the only way to get the server to send the request to the right site.

(When dealing with SSL, then things are different, because you can't authenticate the connection until you get the cert, you can't send data until the connection is authenticated, and the server can't give you the right cert until it gets the Host. Fundamental conflict, leading to one-IP-per-domain-name, or a pricey wildcard certificate. So in that case, the server doesn't care much about Host anymore, but you are still protected because the domain name that the browser sees has to match the one in the cert, or the browser gives you the OH NOES dialog. But I digress.)

It's not even necessary to check the HOST header. Simply use name-based virtual hosts and forbid access to the default virtual host. This denies access to simple drive-by bots that crawl IP ranges and others that request a HOST that isn't configured as a virtual host.

FYI: Name based virtual hosting uses the Host Header to route.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_hosting#Name-based

Remember, TCP/IP doesn't specify Hostname, messages are only routed by IP.

HTTP 1.1 specifies the Host Header specifically to enable features like name based virtual hosting.

Interesting. Thinking about possible use cases. Any ideas?

Yeah... I'd expect most people who need such service to own their own domains already.

Although if they added the "fill in my ip" button as someone else suggested, it might be useful for connecting to customer machines for debugging. Instead of "go to control panel, look for network connections, ...." etc. it would be just - go to ipq, click ok, give me the result. (also, short name might be easier to say over the phone than ip)

I've had the need on dynamically assigned IP addresses to share files with people when the file too large for email, and I didn't want to take the time to upload it to a server on a slower uplink and then have the recipient download it, taking twice as much time.

Being able to open up an Apache or Nginx server without using a confusingly long hostname (eg 127-0-0-1-dhcp.node01.someispdomain.net) which would be easy to misspell over the phone, to let someone grab whatever they needed directly from me makes this a very optimal service for such a small use.

I can see a group of people working on a webapp building a list of subdomains using this service so that a project lead can instantly see how each developer is working on a problem on their local machines.

This looks similar to Dynamic DNS service from DynDNS.com. This is useful if you would like to have a domain name for your home network, for example, but don't want to purchase a domain name and have to update the IP address whenever the ISP changes it.

The downside I see here is that some (many?) home routers support DynDNS service to automatically update your IP address with DynDNS whenever it changes. I don't know whether home routers can be configured to do the same with IPQuick service.

John works for a hosting company (the awesome Brightbox) so I suspect it's just making public one of the tools they use to assign DNS records to newly provisioned boxes.

I just used it to give an easy-to-remember name to a rackspace cloud server I spun up yesterday. This is a throw-away server I'll likely nuke within a month, but for now I will remember how to get back without needing to memorize the IP address.

>needing to memorize the IP address

Really?

This is going to be overrun by spammers and botnets in zero time flat. I bet it will be shut down in a few days.

I get an error when trying to create a record with an email address - "doesn't look like an email address".

Tried it with an ISP email address, and a gmail address.

I'm getting "The change you wanted was rejected. Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to." for every IP address I try: my current Comcast address, and the addresses of a few servers I work on. I also put in 66.220.147.22 (www.facebook.com) just to see what it would do, and got the same message. I'm leaving the optional name and e-mail fields blank.

I'm not really sure what I would use this for. It's nice to have DNS for a box at home, but those aren't usually on a static IP. If my IP is dynamic, I'd probably go with a service like DynDNS which keeps my DNS record updated as the IP address changes.

I can dig it. It's useful when tossing up a web server on a cloud host that assigns an ugly external host name and I'd rather address it by a cleaner host name.

I love that home.ipq.co resolves to 127.0.0.1

Nice and simple interface, Love it :)

Too simple, for me. What if I want to remove the record? Or change the record? I can't tell whether I'll be able to do it or not (I know email doesn't work yet, but is there any other way? No way to tell). If the answer, as I suspect, is that you can't then it's a simple interface because it's a tool that can only do one very limited thing really well.

Very useful. Promptly bookmarked.

What for?

what's the difference between this and bit.ly?

bit.ly does 301 redirects with analytics. this assigns domain names to ip addresses

since when are we downvoting questions?

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