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Show HN: I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust – no DNS libraries
I built a DNS resolver that lets me use https://frontend.numa https://frontend.numa instead of localhost:5173
— auto-generated TLS certs, WebSocket passthrough, path routing. No mkcert, no nginx, no /etc/hosts.
- rdme 6mo agoSince I needed it to be my primary DNS, I also added: recursive resolution from root nameservers, DNSSEC chain-of-trust validation, ad blocking (385K+ domains), and LAN service discovery. I wrote about the DNSSEC implementation here: https://numa.rs/blog/posts/dnssec-from-scratch.html https://numa.rs/blog/posts/dnssec-from-scratch.html It's now my daily system DNS. Single binary (~8MB), macOS/Linux/Windows. `sudo numa install`
- rdme 6mo agoThanks! If you hit any issues during setup, feel free to open an issue — happy to help debug. The dashboard at localhost:5380 shows what's happening in real time.
- siruwastaken 6mo agoWhy are you replying to your own coment?
- happytoexplain 6mo agoI think it's a bot? There's an identical version of this comment in another reply, except it cuts off half way through a sentence.
- rdme 6mo agoI hit reply on the wrong post and you can't delete comments or at least I don't see how it can be done
- dgb23 6mo agoAbove the comments I've written on HN I see: 5 minutes ago | parent | next | edit | delete
- hxugufjfjf 6mo agoThat only lasts for a few minutes until it’s locked and you can no longer delete after that.
- eqvinox 6mo agoIt lasts 2 full hours, at least for edit. Delete stops working when someone replies afaik.
- rdme 6mo agobecause I clicked reply on the wrong one and you can't delete it...
- nalekberov 6mo agoOf course I can’t prove it, but i am guessing some kind of “AI” is doing that. Humans rarely use emdashes.
- BrandoElFollito 6mo ago[flagged]
- nalekberov 6mo ago[flagged]
- BrandoElFollito 6mo ago[flagged]
- dang 6mo agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 6mo agoPlease don't break the site guidelines, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. You're right about em dashes of course (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154752) but being right on a point does not make it ok to attack another user or violate the rules of the site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pyprism 6mo agoVery interesting project! I have a couple of questions. With all the default blocked domains loaded, what is the average memory usage? Currently, I am using Pi-hole on a low memory single board computer. Is it possible to use this instead of Pi-hole? If so, I’d like to use it for all of my devices."
- rdme 6mo agoWith 390K blocked domains: ~31MB total process footprint. Breakdown: - Blocklist: 23.4MB (390K domains) - Cache: 3.8MB (4.4K entries) - Query log, SRTT, runtime: ~4MB It binds to 0.0.0.0:53 by default, so just point your devices' DNS to the board's IP
- onel 6mo agoRomanian project. Instant upvote. Great work
- rbluethl 6mo agoCool idea, every developer running apps in dev on their machine knows this pain for sure. I'll give it a spin and let you know how it goes!
- rdme 6mo agoThanks! If you hit any issues during setup, feel free to open an issue — happy to help debug. The dashboard at localhost:5380 (or at https://numa.numa https://numa.numa)
- lyfeninja 6mo agoI think I need to give this a go. Cool project.
- rdme 6mo agoThanks! Let me know how it goes.
- _kidlike 6mo agovery interesting. how does the blocklist work? can one manage the lists? like StevenBlack or others.
- rdme 6mo agoYes, it is configurable as a list https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa/blob/main/numa.toml#L44 https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa/blob/main/numa.toml#L4... There's also a per-domain allowlist and you can pause/unpause blocking from the dashboard or API. Here's how the resolution pipeline looks like: https://numa.rs/blog/posts/dns-from-scratch.html#the-resolution-pipeline https://numa.rs/blog/posts/dns-from-scratch.html#the-resolut...
- 6r17 6mo agoSame hack here ; I have no DSN running by default - much more handy than having to set up nginx as it has no opinion on the targeted infrastructure. And the bonus point is that you can see every sneaky request that happens when you browse ; so another side-project connected to this is to make an inventory and policy filter
- rdme 6mo agoYes sir! The query log is at GET /querylog (or on the dashboard) shows every request with domain, type, path (forwarded/recursive/cached/blocked) and latency
- voltagex_ 6mo agoGreat idea, pity about the slop.
- bahador 6mo agofeature request: libnuma so i can use it programmatically with configuration. also, multiple user defined blocklists.
- rdme 6mo agoMultiple blocklists already work -https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa/blob/main/numa.toml#L44 https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa/blob/main/numa.toml#L4... The pieces are already there for libnuma, it could be done, would you share what use case you have in mind?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- EdoardoIaga 6mo ago[flagged]
- arafeq 6mo ago[flagged]
- rdme 6mo agoActually, if you point a container's DNS at the host (dns: [host.docker.internal] in compose), it works for resolution + ad blocking for the reverse however, I've added it on the radar, thanks!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dgb23 6mo agoI don't want to hijack the thread, because that's a cool project. Still, if you're looking for something that "just works" and is widely used, have a look at caddy.
- p2hari 6mo agoNice idea. To test I ran a simple nextjs on port 3000. Added the service via the dashboard. However, when I visit the url, (using chrome latest version), https://{mygivenname}.numa/ https://{mygivenname}.numa/ I hit a DNS resolution fail error. If I do not use a trailing '/' then it is going to google search for {mygivenname}.numa and shows me some search results. Should I open an issue?
- rdme 6mo agoIs it possible you didn't start it as root ( sudo numa install)? Does dig {mygivenname}.numa @127.0.0.1 return 127.0.0.1 ? What OS are you on? Maybe you report it as an issue?
- p2hari 6mo agoThanks for quick response. It started to work. I think it must be some caching issue. But it needs a trailing '/' . Maybe will raise the issue for this. Cool.
- arcaen 6mo agoI believe that is actually browser specific behavior. I sometimes use a fake TLD for stuff hosted at home, and both chrome and firefox resort to search if I don't include a trailing '/'. My assumption is the browser does a quick match against known TLDs and if it doesn't match then it resorts to search.
- rdme 6mo agoexactly, I'll add a pr soon that tells the os (and browsers) that is'a a valid domain
- goodpoint 6mo agowe need a [slop] flag in the headlines
- voxadam 6mo agoIt's neither here nor there but can I ask about the name? I only ask because when I see "numa" in relation to computing I immediately think "Non-Uniform Memory Access". Very cool project by the way. I wonder how this would run on an OpenWRT device. I see in your install.sh that you support Linux and Darwin/MacOS, do you think there would be any major hurdles in supporting FreeBSD?
- camdv 6mo agoOn the web site, it's named after the second King of Rome
- rdme 6mo agoalso in romanian nume = name(dns) and I also get the easter egg of that well known Romanian song numa numa :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnopHCL1Jk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnopHCL1Jk8 On OpenWRT — it's musl-based Linux so the binary should run the arm one would need a crosscompile Free BSD can be done (pr's welcome?)
- jcalvinowens 6mo agoWhen you've capitalized the N in "Numa", it's a lot more obvious to my brain you don't mean the acronym. But this is nitpicky bikeshedding and maybe I'm weird :)
- kevin061 6mo agoThe interface looks vibecoded. I have no problem with people vibecoding things. In fact, I have zero frontend skills, so I rely on AI to be able to make easy-to-use interfaces. However, I feel like this should be clearly and prominently displayed in the project page. Furthermore it is a little off-putting to see a vibecoded UI because I have very little confidence that the rest of the backend code is not vibecoded. I know I am possibly being unfair, but this is how it looks to me. If the developer tells me they didn't use AI at all, I would believe it.
- rdme 6mo agoIt definitely is and you can see it in the git commits. The DNS wire protocol parser was the original learning project I wrote to understand the spec. Later features (recursive resolver, DNSSEC validation, the dashboard) were built with the help of AI
- kevin061 6mo agoThat's fair, thanks for letting me know!
- andoando 6mo agoI dont get this criticism at all, would you prefer someone write a shittier UI? And since when were people writing amazing bug free software before hand where not being vibe coded meant you could trust its good software? I guess to be fair, beforehand no body would be attempting this kind of thing and releasing it unless they knew what they were doing
- kevin061 6mo agoI literally said I'm fine with using LLMs for the frontend, but I think this should be disclosed clearly.
- bitpush 6mo agoI don't think having conditions to certain things qualify as "I'm fine with it" "I'm fine with people eating meat, as long as they declare so when we go out" like why? Why does it matter?
- dev_l1x_be 6mo agoHow is to compare to AdGuard? If it gets those features I would be switching over.
- rdme 6mo agoNuma can do recursive resolution from root nameservers + DNSSEC, .numa local domains with auto HTTPS for dev, and LAN service discovery. What features would you be interested in?
- dwedge 6mo agoWhat about split horizon dns so I can locally resolve home servers instead of going to tailscale
- rdme 6mo agoSplit DNS already works — Numa auto-detects Tailscale forwarding rules from the system config. Queries matching .<ts.net> go to Tailscale’s DNS, everything else goes through Numa If you want to skip Tailscale entirely for home servers, Numa’s LAN discovery auto-finds machines running Numa on the same network. Or add static records in numa.toml for machines that don’t run it.
- dev_l1x_be 6mo agoJust normal ad filtering.
- bulanel 6mo agonice
- dwedge 6mo agoI have a couple of projects that once a month need to run a few million dns lookups as quickly as possible. I'm tempted to try this just to see how it performs and if it breaks.
- rdme 6mo agolet me know if you do it!
- Asuka-wx 6mo agoNice work. What made you choose this license?
- conradludgate 6mo agoWhat's the reason you're not using hickory? Or was that the LLMs choice? Genuinely curious
- rdme 6mo agoThis was started as a learning project, went from the start to the lowest level then I've just added features I wanted one by one, it just made the most sense
- BugsBunnyCodes 6mo agoI have a project that requires DNS lookups and block ads. I am going to try this for it.
- rdme 6mo agolet me know how it goes
- derodero24 6mo ago[flagged]
- derodero24 6mo ago[flagged]
- derodero24 6mo ago[flagged]
- fanf2 6mo agoThe first thing I look at in new DNS code is whether it’s vulnerable to DNS name compression loops. This code passes the test! However it’s vulnerable to dots embedded in labels: it doesn’t escape bytes properly when converting from wire format to text.
- BobbyTables2 6mo agoHow does one handle dots embedded in a label ? Isn’t that not valid?
- rdme 6mo agoThanks for pointing this out! I’ve created https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa/issues/36 https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa/issues/36
- rdme 6mo agoshould be fixed by #54 in 0.10.3 thanks again!