[alanctgardner2]

Oh! Treat records as key-value pairs, and encode the value into the IP. If your timeout is 10 seconds, add a DNS record timeout.server.yourdomain which resolves to an IPv6 address with value 10. It gets tougher with ASCII strings, but you could support multi-record configs as well. Then your application just uses nslookup to download the config when you reload it.

If someone builds this I will be their best friend

[rkoz]

DNS maybe good for lightweight service discovery, people have been doing it for ages. However I wont waste anytime trying to dress it up as an answer for real world config management problems (distributed, hierarchical, model-agnostic, consistent .."stuff")

[vidarh]

The only one on your checklist that DNS doesn't cover is consistency, and there's tons of applications where short term inconsistency is totally acceptable.

[zorked]

Well, at the very least there's a TXT record for strings. Access control and consistency may both be issues though.

[derefr]

Crazily enough, this is built into most DNS implementations. It's called Hesiod-class records: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesiod_(name_service)

If you've ever wondered why DNS requires the "IN" (for "Internet") in all its record declarations, it's to make this distinction. The other two options are "HE" (for Hesiod), and "CH", for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosnet.

[darkarmani]

You can also use DNS like a distributed cache. This is useful when you have millions of clients because their local DNS server will do caching for you. You can also use it like a bloom filter where cache hits are true positives and anything that misses might or might not be a valid key.

[ecopoesis]

That sounds like the opposite of a Bloom filter. In a Bloom filter, you can have false positives but you always get true negatives.

[darkarmani]

I meant to say "except" where i went on explaining the opposite kind of lookups.

[enigmo]

That doesn't sound much at all like a bloom filter.