Knowing .me, Knowing .yu: The World of DNS

You’ve heard the saying “it’s always DNS” – but you ever stop to wonder why it’s always DNS? Turns out that DNS – domain name system, the “phone book of the internet” – is a pretty big deal. It’s the massively distributed hierarchical database that turns meaningless IP addresses into friendly, human-readable domain names. It’s also one of the most contentious technologies in history: from million-dollar lawsuits over prestigious .com brands, to security concerns over Unicode support in domains, to geopolitical disputes about the definition of a country. The technical challenges of administering DNS pale into insignificance compared to the sociological challenges of building a network that reflects the countries, companies and conventions of the real world.

Without DNS, the web wouldn’t work, email wouldn’t work; you couldn’t watch a movie or buy a train ticket or pay your taxes. It’s a vital, fundamental layer of modern internet infrastructure, but most developers have no idea how it really works, what it can do - or how to troubleshoot it when it goes wrong. In this talk, we’ll unwrap how DNS really works, we’ll learn why it was built this way, and we’ll hear some of the remarkable stories that happened along the way.

Other talks by Dylan Beattie