DNS and Snow

2021-03-15

I got a pretty tedious project done for one of my classes last week. We had to code up a DNS stub resolver in C. Basically you give the resolver a domain name and a DNS server as arguments, and it builds a properly formatted request, sends it to the given server, and generates and displays a list of CNAMES and A records that it gets back as a response.

Kind of a fun project but I can't stand doing so much work with raw bytes without all the abstractions I think most people and I are used to. Building the byte array for the request wasn't so bad, but parsing the response byte array was just tedious, especially when debugging. The professor was nice enough to give us access to the autograder script that they would be using to grade us, which was a blessing because it allowed me to kinda just give up for the sake of my own sanity and submit what I had as soon as I was passing enough tests to get an A.

I still have an appreciation for C though. I just doubt it's really my thing. But who knows, it might just be too early to say something like that.

In other news we got 20 inches (half a meter) of snow over the weekend. The whole neighborhood was snowed in pretty well and most folks were out shoveling and plowing this morning. We made some good progress on it so hopefully we can actually go somewhere if we need to today and tomorrow. But the forecast has us expecting some more snow tomorrow so who really knows.

- moddedBear

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A photo of the snow from last night

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