

Show HN: Randall, a micro-shortner for personal use - justinlilly
https://github.com/justinlilly/randall

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jamiecurle
I get really nervous running something with sudo that writes to my hosts file.

This is a really nice idea and I'd love to see it in another implementation.

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justinlilly
Totally understood. I started out writing a DNS server. Turns out, DNS is
flipping complicated. I do make backups to the hosts file before every write.
For me, I don't have anything complex in my hosts file, except the stuff
Randall adds. The rest is just the default 4 lines.

~~~
jamiecurle
Perhaps this is where I get nervous, I put quite a bit in my hosts file for
local development.

I'm a shortcut junkie though so I completely love the idea of a personalised
DNS server that learns what I commonly resolve and allows me to make
shortcuts.

Have you ran into any issues with it hosing your /etc/hosts file at all?

~~~
justinlilly
I've not. It seems to "just work". This with the caveat that I have about 10
things that I actually want to use it for (so far), so I'm not doing a tons of
writes. My current mappings are:

m -> mail.google.com m1,m2 -> mail.google.com/mail/1,2/ (1 or 2, not both) cr
-> github.com/sprintly/sprint.ly/pulls (cr = code review) docs ->
docs.google.com c -> google.com/calendar

We had this system when I worked at Google (it was probably DNS as my hosts
file wasn't altered) so I got really used to going to c/ when I wanted
calendars. :)

