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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

What I don't get anyway is why provider DNS servers are needed at all. Customer routers can be set up as full-fledged DNS resolvers, there are numerous lightweight and open-source solutions for this.

edit: removed the reference to dnsmasq - it is one of the very few DNS packages that cannot do recursion [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_server_softw...

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You're right, but caching would be much less effective and this would place a larger load on authoritative servers, especially the roots and TLDs. In-practice it would be less reliable too; there are a lot of DDOS-mitigation techniques involved in internet-scale DNS operations, and direct consumer resolvers would fall victim to throttling and other measures at much higher rates than the pseudo-centralized ISP resolvers.

It'd be a pretty big shift in patterns and so far the Internet operator consensus has been to avoid this.

> It'd be a pretty big shift in patterns and so far the Internet operator consensus has been to avoid this.

Agreed, but if there is any hope to avoid even more centralization to enforce censorship, that stance has to change. And better it changes now and gradually so that everyone can adjust, than that it changes rapidly e.g. as the result of opposition to yet another censorship bill.

There is very unlikely any hope there will be less centralization. Not relying on a "evil theory" explanation or anything it's just impractical to deploy it that way all the time. The nice thing about the design is for those that really do see it as critically important it allows for them to do it. Since that number is low it doesn't create scaling problems.

Performance is lower when there isn't enough requests to keep the more common lookups cached. A more busy resolver with the more common entries cached will have a significant performance advantage.

The traditional reason was probably distributed caching, to reduce the load on authorative servers.

Having an ISP or open resolver near you with cached results alsoo means less latency, when you first look up a domain.

dnsmasq is not a recursive resolver.

You are completely right, had a brain fart somewhere when I wrote this. Thanks, corrected it.

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