It was DNS, and somebody meant it

The DNS Museum catalogues 49 things people have built with DNS, the internet's address book, under a label the museum picked for itself: "always impractical". It was posted to Hacker News on Friday.

DNS sits underneath almost everything online, so when a site stops working it is one of the first suspects. Alongside that sits a joke that is not really a joke: whatever has broken, it is always DNS. The museum is that suspect's own scrapbook. It collects 49 cases where the answer really was DNS, picked on purpose. Here, finding DNS at the bottom of a problem is good news.

One example. Traceroute is the command people run when something has broken, to see the route packets take across the network, hop by hop, and work out where they stopped. The museum's exhibit sets up a path whose routers are named so that the hops spell lines of "American Pie". The question goes in, the hops come back in order, and the answer to where it broke arrives as a verse. The investigation asks who did this, and the suspect sings.

One of the first suspects every time, one retrospective at last, and nothing on display was any use to anyone. Blamed for everything, guilty of nothing useful.

The next time something goes down and someone says it was DNS, the only question left is whether anybody meant it.

Our field guide explains how DNS ended up as the first thing anyone suspects when a site goes down. The museum is the other side of that joke: 49 entries, and nobody arrived at any of them by mistake. The guide also points to The Absolute Constant.