DNS Toys

“Why? For fun.” I love this. It doesn’t need a reason to exist. It’s interesting on its own. That being said, can anyone think of additional interesting reasons for why this would be useful rather than the same toys over HTTP?

This reminds me of a neat little trick I used back then to "reliably" compute IP address of my machines for a dynamic DNS utility I wrote for myself. OpenDNS resolvers (such as resolver1.opendns.com) will resolve myip.opendns.com to your actual IP address. Whether you get A or AAAA records depends on your connection. Since the IP addresses for these resolvers tend to be anycast IPs, I also want to believe they are marginally faster than pinging some central HTTP service…

That is creative. One feature request to consider would be using records off dns.toys instead of requiring @dns.toys for people behind firewalls that must route their request through their recursive servers. e.g. dig mumbai.time.dns.toys Some functions obviously will not work the same way such as myip.dns.toys that would instead show the recursive DNS server SNAT IP unless their server supports edns client subnet forwarding.