I’ve had some adventures with DNS recently. DNS resolves domain names to IP addresses, so it, uh, mostly just looks things up. It won’t forward traffic, or resolve the path in a url to some other path, or anything like that. It won’t help you serve things over HTTPS. It just translates domain names to IP addresses.

That’s a bit limiting, but so it goes. For example, over the past few years, I’ve created a lot of urls that I’d ultimately like to resolve differently than I had originally intended, but DNS is not actually much help for this. On the positive side, the most useful aspect of DNS for me has been CNAMEs. CNAMEs allow me to assign one of my domains or subdomains to a service out there somewhere on the internet. For example, I can make the subdomain https://fictograph.ocert.at point to an application that lives in the cloud (in this example, on PythonAnywhere). That’s kind of neat.

Anyhow, all of this has given me a greater appreciation of the difficulty of keeping links working. DNS has taught me that naming stuff is hard.

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