3 ms·

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 D

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.

edent 2y ago
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 https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
toast0 2y ago
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.
avipars 2y ago
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 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1876#section-5.1
aa-jv 2y ago
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..
- chgs 2y ago
  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.

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.

edent 2y ago

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

toast0 2y ago

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.

avipars 2y ago

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

aa-jv 2y ago

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..

chgs 2y ago
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.