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Discussion on: Why do we still speak in direct DNS?

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman

Maybe I just learned it too long ago, but I have not found DNS all that bad to work with, excepting the up to 24 hrs changes. Being able to set low TTLs can help with that but you first have to wait out the original TTL.

The thing that bugs me most about DNS currently is privacy.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern • Edited

I don’t personally find it that hard, but I was just interacting with someone who needed to set up DNS and needed help and they were making mistakes and it really made me think that it’s still designed for the sensibilities of tech folks and not normal people.

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Matt Ellen • Edited

I remember once I was trying to set up a subdomain (or whatever maybe the correct nomenclature) to point to a different IP address, and nothing I did seemed to work. I gave up in the end, as it wasn't important.

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defman profile image
Sergey Kislyakov

I wonder what kind of setup you had to do for that person. There are many articles that cover basic DNS stuff (A, NS, MX) so I think non-tech people should not have any problems learning a bit before they do stuff. Most DNS providers have good articles for that stuff as well.

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman

Yes I agree that it is confusing for non-tech folks. I had to help friends and family many times when DNS got involved.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yeah. For devs it's not so bad, but I'm just not sure why it can't be abstracted away more easily for most folks. It's a shame about the web that so many parts of getting online independently are still so technical and such a maintenance burden.

I'm not saying there are easy answers... It's a fundamental problem people keep trying to solve over and over and over again.... But DNS seems like it could be abstracted a little better than it is.

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guledali

Totally agree I had the very same discussion with my team this week regarding this. I had situation with the sendgrid addon on heroku not working for me. Had to figure out SPF & DKIM and how to point DNS and that just for setting up SendGrid. God! How did we get here, there has to be a better way right?