Hacker News Reader

Comment by brokenparser | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations, you have reinvented DNS. You can even pretty much s/HostDB/DNS/g:

    DNS: an old tool to help manage data center inventory and write
    applications around it.

    DNS is our attempt to solve the problem of finding hosts and
    their purposes in a large environment. DNS acts as a Single
    source of truth about all Physical and Virtual servers and is
    used to define their purpose. It helps us group our servers
    through domains and all the software written by the operations
    team revolves around DNS. DNS acts as the centralized
    configuration store for all sorts of information.

View on HN

You must not have read past the introduction. I just skimmed it, but it's clear that this stores considerably more information than DNS.

Yes indeed.

Weird that DNS is mentioned though because I thought this would be about Tom Limoncelli's hostdb, which is a DNS management database!

https://code.google.com/p/hostdb/

First thing I thought was that it should include DNS.

We have a Chef plugin that maps all our machines to IPs. We then delegate a short subdomain to that DNS server and bam, access any server at hostname.sub.domain.com

Set it to your search domain and you can access any of your servers with just the hostname.

DNS can store whatever information you want to put into it.

I agree it's not necessarily going to be that practical for larger items of data, though.

LDAP would be a better comparison, though I can't say I fault people for reinventing LDAP on a regular basis given how annoying it is to work with.

It can be practical for very large records if, say, you use a NAPTR record to point at a web server which serves the actual contents. It just requires a little out-of-the-box thinking. They can both use the same SQL backend so everything is still in the same database.

In this regard, DNS isn't broken and doesn't need fixing. HostDB seems especially obnoxious since it also stores the FQDN and IP address of each host, information which ends up being duplicated in DNS.

you are conflating the source of truth with the tooling built on top of it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com