Show HN: Randall, a micro-shortner for personal use

github.com

4 points·justinlilly··4 comments

I get really nervous running something with sudo that writes to my hosts file.

This is a really nice idea and I'd love to see it in another implementation.

Totally understood. I started out writing a DNS server. Turns out, DNS is flipping complicated. I do make backups to the hosts file before every write. For me, I don't have anything complex in my hosts file, except the stuff Randall adds. The rest is just the default 4 lines.

Perhaps this is where I get nervous, I put quite a bit in my hosts file for local development.

I'm a shortcut junkie though so I completely love the idea of a personalised DNS server that learns what I commonly resolve and allows me to make shortcuts.

Have you ran into any issues with it hosing your /etc/hosts file at all?

I've not. It seems to "just work". This with the caveat that I have about 10 things that I actually want to use it for (so far), so I'm not doing a tons of writes. My current mappings are:

m -> mail.google.com m1,m2 -> mail.google.com/mail/1,2/ (1 or 2, not both) cr -> github.com/sprintly/sprint.ly/pulls (cr = code review) docs -> docs.google.com c -> google.com/calendar

We had this system when I worked at Google (it was probably DNS as my hosts file wasn't altered) so I got really used to going to c/ when I wanted calendars. :)

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