Sure. But without seeing the other sides argument, I have to wonder if their point wasn't that they're not designed to be stable for the purpose of identifying a service/thing on the Internet; things can and do move and change. Hardware failure is a good example of that. Just like a house address, those too are normally stable but people can & do move. Just with software, it's like we look our friend up in the white pages¹ prior to every visit, which one might not do in real life.
¹oh God I'm dating myself here.
1. Why do I state that. Because I kept reading about why DNS was created and always encountered the same parroted explanation, year after year. Something along the lines that IP addresses were constantly in flux. That may have been true when DNS was created and the www was young. But was it true today. I wanted to find out. I did experiments. I found I could use the same DNS data day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Why would I care. Because by eliminating remote DNS lookups I was able to speed up the time it takes me to retrieve data from the www.^2 Instead of making the assumption that every site is going to switch IP addresses every second, minute, day or week, I assume that only a few will do that and most will not. I want to know about those sites that are changing their IP address. I want to know the reasons. When a site changes its IP address, I am alerted, as you see with today's change to HN's address. Whereas when people assume every site is frequently changing its IP address, they perform unnecesary DNS lookups for the majority of sites. That wastes time among other things. And, it seems, people are unaware when sites change addresses.
2. Another benefit for me is that when some remote DNS service does down (this has happened several times), I can still use the www without interruption. I already have the DNS data I need. Meanwhile the self-proclaimed "experts" go into panic mode.
> they perform unnecesary DNS lookups for the majority of sites
Is it actually unnecessary if the IPs can change? I'm fine with the extra 20ms on the access every once in a while in exchange for no mysterious failure every few years.
I am not really I fan because I like to choose the IP address, instead of letting someone else decide. I believe in user choice.
In some cases I have found the "most optimal" IP address for me is not always the one advertised based on the location of the computer sending the query.
It is like choosing a mirror when downloading open source software. I know which mirrors I prefer. The best ones for me are not necessarily always the ones closest geographically.
As for the question, the answer is yes. Because if it did not change then the query was not needed. If it does change then I will know and I will get the new address. The small amount of time it takes to get the new address and update a textfile is acceptable to me. I may also investigate why the address changed. Why did this HN submission go to the front page, why does it have so many points and comments. Some people are interested when stuff happens. I actually like "mysterious failures" because I want to know more about the sites I visit. Whereas an extra delay every time a TTL expires, for every name, again and again, over and over, every day, that is a lot of time cumulatively. Not to mention then I have to contend with issues of DNS privacy and security. When I started weaning myself off DNS lookups, there was no zone signing and encrypted queries.
The approach I take is not for everybody. I make HTTP requests outside the browser and I read HTML with a text-only browser. I do what works best for me.
Do you also object to anycast?
For example, I ping 198.41.0.4. I choose to ping that address over all the others, e.g., www.google.com or whatever other people use. That is what I mean by user choice. I know the address is anycasted. Where the packets actually go is not something I get to choose. It would be neat to be able control that, e.g., if source routing actually worked on today's internet. But I have no such expectations.
How do Tor users know that an exit node IP address listed for a foreign country is not anycasted and the server is actually located somewhere else.
Maybe check against a list of anycast prefixes.
http://raw.githubusercontent.com/bgptools/anycast-prefixes/m...