Buying something in bitcoin using only the protocol spec and man pages? Tweeting from a Linux from scratch install? Writing a correct tar command on the first try? Writing a quine on your favorite language without google?
My take on it was that lots of this old software was implemented by candlelight with a magnetized needle, a 512KiB HDD platter and a steady hand; so I should be able to reimplement it in a modern language with modern tooling in a lot less time, while learning a lot about the system. Like, dig command output means a lot more to me now than it did at the start, and I now appreciate what articles like the OP mean now.
https://robertheaton.com/2018/12/08/programming-projects-for...
The project goals are not as lofty as those proposed by nishanth_v's friend, but Mr. Heaton goes the extra mile to turn each project idea into a step by step mini-curriculum with lots of extension points.
Then, he goes another extra mile by allowing readers to email in their buggy projects, and running a companion series where he teaches people how to debug / fix / improve their code by refactoring reader's attempts at the "...Advanced Beginners" projects.
Recommended.
Not quite the same as I'm not following or reimplementing any established standard, but it's interesting and fun to Greenfield a c++ project using minimal dependencies to do things like:
- invent and parse a DSL - modularise components and connections between them - possibly cyclic directed graph traversal - efficient near-real-time audio processing (working in chunks within a time budget) - multithreading / parallel module processing - spit the outputs into an audio device and/or wav files - eventually put a GUI on top
In the same vein, I think building or designing some of the components in an OS or Systems book[1] could have a similar positive result.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-computing-systems-se...
I usually get it to run a simple loop to print hello world and do the inevitable Fibonacci generator and get bored. No fancy things like functions!
One of these things was crudely repurposed into a domain specific language for a job as well which was handy.
If I can dream, an LDAP implementation with a similar target as GP wound be fantastic.
That’s not a short one though (:
Dnsmasq or PowerDNS weren't suitable?
The niche I'm aiming for is for people who just want to map hostnames to IP addresses. And note this isn't a commercial offering, just something I built for myself that I'm going to put up a website for and maybe some other people will find interesting. I do think I have some product-market fit because even among my dev friends, who are all quite talented, many of them have mentioned to me "yeah I threw bind9 on a server but decided I didn't hate typing IPs enough to actually set up and operate it".
I'm aiming for zero onboarding time and zero maintenance headache. You run a docker container, map the ports, and then there's a nice web UI that takes you the rest of the way.
The difference is huge in other ways, though. Configuration, operations, and maintenance of the BIND cluster is 20 fold more involved, and when things break, they can break in really confusing ways. Such is the world of computing though, the better something performs, the more places it has where you can mess it up.
That sounds pretty different from the audience they said they're targeting → "impatient homelabbers/SMB".
As another commenter points out though, the load you're talking about definitely sounds like something PowerDNS should handle without much problem. Given reasonably spec-ed, hardware and software that is.
It's used by some pretty big places:
Anyway, in the process of doing this and putting it in my DHCP config and seeing the traffic from two smart TVs of different brands, my RIPE atlas probe, various phones and laptops, smart thermostat, etc etc, I've noticed that there is a TON of "garbage" dns requests. Like, the chart [the article] shows - where about 70% of queries result in a name error - that totally meshes with what I see on a much smaller scale. Right now, prometheus tells me that since last restart (which was about a week ago at this point?), I've answered 80437 queries with NO_ERROR, 52014 with NAME_ERROR, and 242 with SERVER_FAILURE (funnily enough, when spot checking these, 8.8.8.8 also SERVER_FAILUREs these same requests - usually devices with presumably-buggy dns libraries not correctly specifying lengths of variable-length fields).
It really surprised my initial suspicions that so many DNS requests would be coming up with what I was originally considering to be an error condition. But I guess sometimes the absence of a DNS record is just as meaningful as the presence.
Incidentally, I also noticed these chromium dns requests, and they had me worried for a bit because I wondered if they were malware trying to exploit some kind of vuln in dns servers. Took a bit of googling to figure it out. I do think they make up a decent % of the name errors I see, though I hadn't gotten around to having prometheus split them out to measure.