The weird and wonderful world of DNS LOC records (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The weird and wonderful world of DNS LOC records (2014)

blog.cloudflare.com

115 pointsavipars59 comments

Back in 2014 when I wrote this I said "CloudFlare handles millions of DNS records; of those just 743 are LOCs." I asked the team for an update and that number is now... 3,198.

That's a 300% increase!

That's almost 400%!

That's 33% more than 300%.

That's almost 50% more!

A friend of mine passed away last year and I use a domain named after her as a small memorial, sally.pro. I just gave it a LOC record pointing to a bench in the park that we adopted for her.

I shall have a rest on this bench in honor of your friend if I'm ever in Astoria Park.

I’m in Astoria, I’ll go pay a visit this week!

If you have a geotagged photo of the bench, we'd be honoured to host it on https://openbenches.org/

Its insane how many there are in the UK

To be fair, we are a UK based site - and most of my friends are in the UK.

But, yeah, even in other Anglophone countries I've visited there haven't been as many memorial benches.

Thanks, I’ve uploaded some photos.

https://openbenches.org/bench/33460

Looks gorgeous! Much appreciated.

I didn't even know this site existed. This is really cool. I will stop procrastinating and get a bench.

Is there a reason why you require photos to be geotagged rather than allowing people to manually enter a location?

Because people tend to have fallible memories whereas GPS is reasonably accurate.

If you've walked a costal path and taken a dozen photos, are you really going to remember where each one was?

Every phone for the last decade has geotagging built in to its camera app. Relying on EXIF is the easiest way for us to ensure the map is broadly accurate.

> Because people tend to have fallible memories whereas GPS is reasonably accurate.

GPS locations are simple to look up on, for example, Google Maps--I just click my mouse at the place where I know the bench I took a picture of is located. My memory of where it is is not at all fallible since it's a memorial bench for my parents just down the street from the house where they used to live. I could easily enter the GPS coordinates from Google Maps into your site if your site would allow me to.

> If you've walked a costal path and taken a dozen photos, are you really going to remember where each one was?

But your site is not for uploading random photos people take on walks. It is for uploading pictures of memorial benches. The locations of those are much more likely to be remembered by the people who want to upload the pictures, accurately enough to get GPS coordinates in the way I described above.

> Every phone for the last decade has geotagging built in to its camera app.

I've only had my phone a few years and the photos I have of the bench I wanted to upload are not geotagged. I know that because your site told me so when I tried to upload them.

I'm sorry for your loss

Wow that's so interesting. I have a domain for my SO that passed away and we scattered her ashes at her facvorite camp site. So I should do the same.

How do you go about adopting a bench in Astoria Park?

https://www.nycgovparks.org/opportunities/support/honor

It took a while, with emails going unanswered for long periods at times.

While the example here is broken, http://find.me.uk still works:

  $ dig loc SW1A1AA.find.me.uk
  
  ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> loc SW1A1AA.find.me.uk
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 63530
  ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
  
  ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
  ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;SW1A1AA.find.me.uk.  IN LOC
  
  ;; ANSWER SECTION:
  SW1A1AA.find.me.uk. 21600 IN LOC 51 30 3.637 N 0 8 29.624 W 0.00m 0.00m 0.00m 0.00m

Bummer. The example in the articles doesn't work.

  # dig geekatlas.com LOC @1.1.1.1
  
  ; <<>> DiG 9.20.0 <<>> geekatlas.com LOC @1.1.1.1
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 19487
  ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1,   ADDITIONAL: 1
  
  ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
  ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;geekatlas.com.   IN LOC
  
  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  geekatlas.com.  300 IN SOA ns1.namefind.com. dns.jomax.net.   2023031500 28800 7200 604800 300
  
  ;; Query time: 22 msec
  ;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
  ;; WHEN: Mon Jul 29 08:46:31 EDT 2024
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 104

Yeah. Sorry about that! I wrote that 10 years ago and had totally forgotten about it. And I shut down The Geek Atlas' web site a long time ago.

> And I shut down The Geek Atlas' web site a long time ago.

Which if I may notice is a shame.

It got basically zero traffic.

It' a shame, it was good stuff.

We exchanged several emails back in the early 2000's when I was reading your blog of the time. And I have the book :)

LOC on reverse DNS seems a much more elegant solution than RFC 8805 Geofeeds (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8805).

In particular, it solves the discovery issue discussed in RFC 9092 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9092), allows real-time updates, and would make it easier for ISPs to delegate maintenance of geolocation records to customers.

I found this [1] for generating LOC records using Google Maps.

Verified it works on another machine, my daily driver was blocking something. Also verified coordinates that it generates.

[1] - https://dnsloc.net/

Firstly I never knew Loc records existed… interesting to read something like this.

Secondly I think cloudflare will see an (sizable???) increase in Loc records due to this article

That would be cool ;)

I naively assumed this would be about localised caching. You'd think straight-line distance would be a reasonable proxy for speed.

Hence you could have

* google.com <LOC San Francisco>

* google.com <LOC London>

and pick the right one

but that's not really how it works at all :(

I'd imagine that there are some sharp edge cases where a nearby straight-line distance is a suboptimal choice due to peculiarities of submarine cables or irregular point to point links of some other sort.

And that’s only on the physical layer. Then you’d get into the weird and wonderful world of BGP routing.

Earlier (and only) submission in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508234

Perhaps the title of this post can be edited to include [2014] as well.

Hey, I didn't see that when i posted... It won't let me revise the title, but if an admin could that would be great!

Delta between the two postings are 10 years

Send an email to hn@ycombinator.com and @dang will surely help you out.

Done!

I put a LOC record on cam.ac.uk set to 10km in diameter, so it basically covers the official precincts of the university which require that students live within 3 miles of the centre of the city.

See also: DNS LOC: Geo-enabling the Domain Name System <https://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/>

I've just given us a LOC record, do I get a prize?

You get to write the follow-up article about how posting LOC records in DNS is a security hole! :D

One of many strange features in DNS. I seem to recall a talk a few years ago where someone enumerated a variety of weird DNS capabilities and some interesting security consequences, but I don't remember the name of the talk or the speaker. Does anyone happen to know what I'm half-remembering?

Perhaps?

https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/dns_bizarre_a...

Not it, but really excellent! Thanks

This is interesting, but can anyone give me an example of using this for beyond just a simple easter egg? Presumably this had some real use to be added to the DNS spec.

DNS can contain all sorts of records that, at some point, someone thought was worth standardising.

In this case, I assume it used to be so common for a sub-domain to refer to a single physical box that there was utility in knowing exactly where in the world it was.

Cf https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

Seems like a reasonable way to track the locations of named items; especially if the location of the items is public and amenable to caching. Especially if you assume network clients are capable of general networking, and not limited to typical browser stuff. May also need to assume typical recursive DNS servers won't mess up your lookups, because that's not always a reasonable assumption anymore.

For something modern like tracking a private fleet or your friends, you'd need to overlay access control or something. Something like how e164.arpa was conceptually going to be public, but ended up behind private networks so access control and cost accounting could be added.

  Possible use case from the RFC: 

   "Some uses for the LOC RR have already been suggested, including the
   USENET backbone flow maps, a "visual traceroute" application showing
   the geographical path of an IP packet, and network management
   applications that could use LOC RRs to generate a map of hosts and
   routers being managed."

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1876#section-5.1

There are plenty of track-side boxes in the rail industry which could benefit from this.

See also point-of-presence installations - if you have to drive 2 hours to flick a switch, it'd be nice to have the LOC properly configured for the dead box..

However having that data publicly visible might not be appreciated, and DNS might not be the best place to store the data compared with a normal instance of netbox etc with much finer grained access control.

Hmm. Is there a tool to ping a list of LOC records and feed/update OSM automatically?

I feel like you'd probably want some human review in there somewhere, otherwise that sounds ripe for abuse (and a subsequent headache that the OSM community probably doesn't want to deal with)

I think it's pretty cool, could just be another layer/whatever. I know OSM is set up for that kind data intermingling.

Cloudflare only has ~3000 LOC records so I doubt the entirety of the Internet is more than an order of magnitude bigger.

I think it would be pretty cool to see a map with any domains near me, etc.

I don't think that exist, but you've nerdsniped me into trying to build it (or at least the collection side). Does anybody have better ideas than just trying a list of all known DNS names?

Would be fun to make a scavenger hunt game using these.

I was going to add it to a CTF challenge which is why I found this article.

Another good one is HINFO

I also like RP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com