Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Opposite take: I consider IPs appearing anywhere except the dhcpd configuration and the DNS zone files (or their database equivalents) to be a bug.

IPs are opaque and meaningless. Maybe you can keep in your head that “.2 is the database, .3 is the web server, .4 is the redis, .5 is the other api, .6 is the other database”, but I can’t and wouldn’t even if I could.

DNS is rarely the problem.

View on HN

>IPs are opaque and meaningless.

Get a sheet of paper. Draw a line down the middle. Put the IP in one column. Put the thing on it on the other side. Tape to wall, or put in binder.

>...but I can’t and wouldn’t even if I could.

>DNS is rarely the problem.

People that can't even be arsed to remember where their bits are on the other hand...

It's not like appserver1234.internal is significantly less opaque and meaningless. Either way you probably want a control panel somewhere that can give you extra information about a node.

db-server-4x-16g.cluster1.fqdn

contains a lot of information outside of an external lookup.

this doesn't scale – what happens when you want to add another piece of information? how do you change the schema for all the names?

Cnames, reverse records, TXT records, the sky is the limit

No what happens when you want to add information to the name. Do you go through and update all your existing records? Having DNS names just be opaque ids that point to an entry in a db (which can be a TXT record) is usually a lot better.

It's the only thing you can guarantee will never change. The name points to exactly that server.

DNS offers TXT records...

What happens when “db-server-4x-16g.cluster1.fqdn” stops hosting a database?

I’m all for DNS instead of IP’s, but we need to stop encoding too much information into names…

Delete it.

This is funniest convo I heard about DNS for a long time.

Makes me wonder what GP does with the plate when he finishes his dinner.

Pets = ceramic plate

Cattle = paper plate

I'll let the reader make the connections

Not if your hostnames look like that. There is the potential in DNS for semantic hierarchy, though, if you choose to take advantage of it, that is not available in IP addressing.

heh. no, don't use IPs either. You use well-known service names and use a dedicated service discovery mechanism to reach your service nodes in a resilient and scalable manner.

Some kind of name service could return various values for you different domains. Sounds like a great idea.

You joke but Consul is usually better at being DNS than actual DNS for a lot of use-cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com