Ramblings on DNS
I currently work for No-IP, one of the original and largest Dynamic DNS providers in the world (since 1999!). I’ve learned a ton about DNS, reading RFC’s for fun, and helping users with mostly basic inquiries on why their “domain doesn’t work”.
One of the most valuable things I’ve learned over the years is how much most tech workers don’t know about DNS.
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying; “It’s always DNS.”
The Problem
I’ve learned a lot about DNS working at No-IP. After working with many sysadmins, systems architects, network security engineers, cloud professionals, etc. in a customer service role, it has surprised me how little most people in the coding and systems world know about DNS.
If you’ve spent any time around coders or system administrators, you’ve probably heard the phrase: “It’s always DNS.” It’s the go-to scapegoat for everything from broken websites to mysterious outages. Sure, DNS is important… make the wrong change, and things can go sideways fast.
But here’s the thing: DNS isn’t some mystical beast. For those of us who stare down DNS records for a living, it’s more like a well-trained dog than a wild animal. With a solid setup and some basic understanding of how DNS works (Read the RFC’s!), DNS is reliable, predictable, and, dare I say, boring.
So why does DNS get blamed so often? Maybe because it’s easy to overlook, or maybe because it’s the last thing anyone checks. But in my experience, the real culprit is usually somewhere else: a systems administator or developer who doesn’t understand how DNS works.
Don’t get me wrong, playing with DNS can break things. But DNS is pretty simple.
You’ve probably heard of the phonebook analogy, which states something like “Think of DNS like a phonebook. Your computer needs to know the IP address of a website, it looks in a phone book for an answer, and gets an IP address back”
This is a bit overly simplistic.. unlike a real phonebook, DNS is constantly updated, distributed, and there are many different phone books all over the world, that might say different things. That being said, if you have a basic knowledge of how DNS works, and what a working setup should look like, DNS will go from something scary, to something very boring.
So next time someone says, “It’s always DNS,” just smile. You know better.