DNS Record Types | Hacker News Reader

DNS Record Types

nslookup.io

173 pointsthunderbong27 comments

I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNS_record_types

Nice page, but a strange product.

Why would anyone pay for an API that performs DNS queries instead of just performing a DNS query?

Ruurtjan from nslookup.io here. No one is really using the API it yet. Some competitors seem to be doing well, so I guess there's a demand. Maybe because it's simpler to integrate over HTTP than over DNS in terms of network config for enterprises? Not sure.

I don’t see why it’s simpler, though there’s an argument to be made for HTTP being more familiar.

Well... are you / competitors just proxying or is there DoH elements sparkled in?

ps: lovely graphics

It's just a glorified Dig wrapper ;)

I haven’t looked at your API but a subtly critical aspect of diagnostics or introspection is being able to query from multiple client locations/resolvers. It’s really important to be able to disambiguate the “view” different clients have of the same labels.

Alternatively, if you’re targeted at direct client use, you may want to allow them to control the edns options, like client subnet, themselves.

> Some competitors seem to be doing well, so I guess there's a demand.

Sounds like a really thought out business plan.

You can't make DNS query from browser JavaScript AFAIK.

ahha

> You can't make DNS query from browser JavaScript AFAIK.

Yes, you can. [1] Lots of public DNS resolvers have support for it, too. [2]

Example:

fetch('https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query?name=example.com&type=A...', { method: 'GET', headers: new Headers({ 'accept': 'application/dns-json' })});

Note that this is the JSON-specific format [3]. DNS over HTTPS itself uses the DNS wireformat [4], so you would have to build a parser for that if you want to integrate it into a web app.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/doh/json

[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encrypted-dns/dns-...

[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8427

[4] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8484

That's a HTTP request no matter what data is being returned. Fact still stands that there is no JS API in browsers to make proper DNS requests (without HTTP).

Some might argue that DoH is proper DNS. Port 53 DNS sucks.

DoH in its current implementation is just a tunnel using https to reach someone elses centralized servers that are using port 53 DNS. The root servers do not yet support DoH/DoT and I would be pleasantly surprised if they ever did.

Most of us are on the other end of the DNS hierarchy, and send queries to recursive resolvers, not root servers. Root server operators are conservative and there's much less of privacy consideration when traffic is mixed with others at a resolver.

Maybe rate limiting?

I run an install of RRDA[1] because it's easier to use http/json in scripts than parsing raw DNS queries.

[1] https://github.com/fcambus/rrda

I always thought ALIAS records were an actual record type, but it seems like they are non-standard additions by all the registrars that support it. Interesting.

I only know about ALIAS because AWS where you can create ALIAS records on AWS managed services only.

ANAME is a really nice alternative that improves on the ALIAS concept: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-aname...

Offtopic, but the number of visitors on this site are publicly available: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=day

Jep, but I’ve started proxying the statistics JavaScript to circumvent ad blockers. So the historic stats are a bit lower than today’s.

It's a pretty nice infographic! If that company ever thinks of making merch, I think a non-zero amount of people would buy a T-shirt with it, heh.

There's no company, it's just me :) I'll probably make a printable cheatsheet at some point, but I'm not yet sure what else to put on there.

It'd be nice if there were a bit more info on the different types (I tried clicking one of interest) - even just a link to the relevant RFC (section) would be cool.

Also you have a typo in the list (correct in the graphic) - 's/SVR/SRV/'.

Thanks! Fixed once CI is done building and deploying :)

Nice diagram, but DLV can be safely removed as it's officially obsolete: https://www.iana.org/go/rfc8749

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