DNS Is Way Weirder Than You Think: Wild Experiments That Push the Protocol to Its Limits
You use DNS every single day. Every time you type a website address, send an email, or stream a video, the Domain Name System silently works behind the scenes to route you to the right destination. It's reliable, it's essential, and honestly? It's kind of boring.
Except it turns out DNS can also be weird, wonderful, and completely impractical.
The DNS Museum is a growing collection of creative experiments that stretch this humble protocol far beyond its intended purpose. It currently features 49 entries organized into categories that range from "clever" to "why would anyone do this?"—and we mean that as a genuine compliment.
Spell Out Star Wars With Network Packets
Traceroutes are network diagnostic tools that map the path your data takes across the internet. Normally they display boring IP addresses and server names. But what if you could embed messages in those reverse DNS names?
Enter creative traceroutes that spell things out. The "American Pie traceroute" displays song lyrics as you trace across the globe. There's a version that spells out the entire first chapter of Star Wars. One particularly ambitious project displays a Christmas tree. Another—our personal favorite—draws a hand using IPv6 hop expansion. It's not fast. It's not useful. But watching a network path slowly render "HELLO WORLD" in domain names is oddly mesmerizing.
DNS Over Everything
Here's a question nobody asked: what if you could send DNS queries over platforms that were never designed for them?
That's exactly what a playful community of developers has built. DNS over IRC. DNS over Telegram. DNS over Signal. DNS over Twitter (RIP). DNS over Mastodon. Someone even built a telephone interface called DialDNS that lets you dial into a server and query DNS with your phone's keypad.
Our personal favorite: DNS over SMS. You text a domain to a number, and it texts back the IP address. It's slower than using a browser, orders of magnitude more ridiculous, and absolutely beautiful in its stubborn creativity.
Turn DNS Into a Web Server
This is where things get genuinely clever. Using DNS TXT records—originally designed for human-readable metadata—developers have built functional HTTP servers. HTML over DNS works by encoding web pages into the responses your computer receives when it looks up a domain. It's agonizingly slow, requires special software to decode, and technically works.
Similarly, dns.toys turns DNS queries into useful utilities. Want to convert currency? Query it through DNS. Need the current time in Tokyo? Ask the DNS. It's a Unix calculator. It plays Wordle. All served through a protocol that technically just returns text strings.
Some developers have taken this even further, hosting entire blogs in DNS. Your "posts" are stored as TXT records. Reading them requires special clients that assemble the fragments. It's like running a website on a floppy disk in 1985—painful, impractical, and absolutely something you can do.
Tunneling Secrets Through DNS
DNS tunneling is one of those ideas that sounds like a hack from a heist movie. The concept: encode arbitrary data in DNS queries and responses, effectively creating a tunnel through firewalls that only expect standard web traffic.
Researchers have built FTP over DNS, HTTP over DNS, and full VPN services that run entirely through DNS queries. The dnscat2 project creates a complete command-and-control channel using nothing but DNS lookups. Security professionals use these techniques to bypass restrictive networks. Nation-state hackers use them too. The fact that it works is either a testament to protocol flexibility or a cautionary tale about internet architecture.
The Purest Form of Tinkering
What strikes us most about these projects isn't their technical merit—though some are genuinely impressive feats of engineering. It's the spirit behind them. These are developers asking "what if?" and then spending weeks building answers to questions nobody posed.
DNS is infrastructure. It's supposed to be boring. It's the plumbing of the internet, and nobody celebrates plumbing. But these experiments remind us that every protocol, every system, every tool we take for granted is ultimately just a canvas waiting for someone creative enough to misuse it.
Whether you're spell-checking lyrics across continents with traceroutes, running a Wordle clone through DNS queries, or tunneling your entire VPN through domain lookups, the message is the same: the internet is a playground, and the most interesting toys aren't always the official ones.
The DNS Museum is at dns.museum if you want to explore all 49 entries. Fair warning: you'll lose a few hours diving down these rabbit holes. And you'll probably start thinking about what impossible thing you could build with DNS.
Because somewhere out there, someone's already running a website through a protocol that was never meant to serve websites. And honestly, that's pretty inspiring.