Hey guys,
I have to understand how DNS records work for a problem at my job. Does anyone have any good advice on literature which could give me a deeper understanding of DNS?
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Honestly, YouTube is a great place to start. I just put in DNS and loads of great videos came up. I was going to recommend some people but some of the videos that came up in that search looked really good.
If you want a book then ‘Computer Networks’ by Peterson Davie is brilliant. Many other great books exist also.
Wikipedia is also great.
This is not a very niche topic so there’s loads of great info out there.
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This is a good place to start:
Do you just need to know about records or do you need to administer a server? If so, which service is it (bind, nsd, powerdns, etc)? The implementation differs between them to varying extents.
To what extent do you need to understand DNSSEC?
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RFCs are everything to tech, get used to reading them and you can handle most any protocol
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc882.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc883.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1034.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1123.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2181.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5890.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5891.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5892.txt
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5893.txt
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True but RFC’s are really only for people who are already experts.
If someone’s asking how to learn DNS then I daresay they might not be in a position to absorb and apply RFCs just yet.
They’re definitely worth reading and really good to get used to reading but maybe not the best starting point for the inexperienced.
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I actually only have to set up an email server but the place I work has a complicated policy on handling DNS records, so I’m trying to understand how that works.
DNS is very simple, but these complicated corporate policies are because it is very easy to make a mistake that causes a large-scale outage (Facebook last year), or hands over the keys for your domain to a third-party. Often, the policies are to make sure changes are intentionally slow and need do be signed-off by multiple people in different organizational areas to reduce the risk of unintentional changes and bad actors.
DNS records are often used as a proxy (in the general/law sense of the definition, not a network proxy) to prove ownership of a domain for online services that link with a domain, for example obtaining Google Analytics / search data or creating a Google Workspace/Cloud Identity account linked with the domain name.
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