Building a DNS Resolver from Scratch in Rust
rust
dev.to
I wanted to understand how DNS actually works. Not the "it translates domain names to IP addresses" explanation — the actual bytes on the wire. What does a DNS packet look like? How does label compression work? Why is everything crammed into 512 bytes? So I built one from scratch in Rust. No hickory-dns, no trust-dns, no simple-dns. The entire RFC 1035 wire protocol — headers, labels, compression pointers, record types — parsed and serialized by hand. It started as a weekend learning project, b