Subject: [DNSOP] Brief update on DNS Camel & Hello-DNS

From: bert hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2018 17:36:31 +0200

Hi everyone,

After the most excellent DNS-OARC in Amsterdam, I got some new zeal to work
on DNS projects. In this message I request feedback & hope that some of you
may want to help.

DNS Camel Viewer
================
First, the "DNS Camel viewer" on https://powerdns.org/dns-camel/ has been
updated with the latest RFCs. I also used the IETF-provided XML of all RFCs
to find some missing RFCs by tracking 'updated-by'. Then I spent some loving
hours moving RFCs from categories like 'core' to 'dns-use'. The result of
this work is that if you only read 'core' and standards (track) DNS
documents, you now only have to work through 79 documents totalling 1257
pages!

In graph form, it now looks like this: https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1054117820542398465

My request is: could you click through https://powerdns.org/dns-camel/ and
check if your favorite RFCs are there, and if they are in the right
categories? Changes can be entered through GitHub.

Hello DNS
=========
https://powerdns.org/hello-dns 

Hello DNS is my effort to document DNS for newcomers, by 'flattening' the 79
RFCs you need to read into one narrative.  Slides and OARC presentation
video can be found through:
https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1053231066474078208

"Hello DNS" comes with documentation but also running code. There is an API for
parsing & creating DNS messages with most RRTYPEs supported. Based on that
library, there are implementations of 'tdig', 'tauth' and 'tres', which do
what you'd expect them to do. Finally, there is a very simple library you
can use to lookup IP addresses, MX and TXT records from C.

'tres' may be of specific interest, it was written after some prodding by
Evan Hunt. It is a 'workaround and cache free DNS resolver'. It is meant to
show how hard and painful it is to write a resolver. Oddly enough, this 400
line resolver appears to be workable. I've been using it to browse the web
for two weeks now and almost nothing is broken.

'tres' also creates fun 'graphviz' output on how it resolves domains.

My request is, could you click through 'hello-dns' and if you find anything
missing (it is still quite a lot), can you head to GitHub and submit more
markdown? 

Specifically in need of help:

https://powerdns.org/hello-dns/stub.md.html
https://powerdns.org/hello-dns/optional.md.html (on EDNS, Dynamic Updates,
TSIG, DNAME, DNS Cookies)

Thanks!

	Bert