Whilst working on one of my projects, I was bound to write my own DNS server. I wanted to play around with it and had to dig through all the RFCs related to DNS and RRs (Resource Records). 
After implementing the basics, I started to getting curious of how I could further improve it. After a quick brainstorming session, I started coding health checks, but also DNS-based load balancing (Round Robin, Random, Geographic, Sticky, etc.).
Now, how could I possibly test Random DNS? Yes! Just add a couple of IPs with different content.
Now, what could the content be? Ofcourse! HEADS AND TAILS! The coinflip was born.
... But why waste my precious traffic for all these TCP &amp; HTTP headers, HTML, and more? Why not just use DNS to return Heads or Tails? And that's how we started creating a DNS-based coinflip service:
<pre><code class="lang-bash">$ for i in {1..10}; do dig coin.heinemann.dev TXT @ns1.gentlent.net +short; done
"Tails"
"Heads"
"Heads"
"Heads"
"Tails"
"Tails"
"Heads"
"Heads"
"Tails"
"Heads"
</code></pre>
Try it out! Just do a TXT query to <code>coin.heinemann.dev</code> and don't forget to <a target="_blank" href="https://heinemann.dev">visit my colleague's website</a> .

Whilst working on one of my projects, I was bound to write my own DNS server. I wanted to play around with it and had to dig through all the RFCs related to DNS and RRs (Resource Records). 

After implementing the basics, I started to getting curious of how I could further improve it. After a quick brainstorming session, I started coding health checks, but also DNS-based load balancing (Round Robin, Random, Geographic, Sticky, etc.).

Now, how could I possibly test Random DNS? Yes! Just add a couple of IPs with different content.

Now, what could the content be? Ofcourse! HEADS AND TAILS! The **coinflip** was born.

... But why waste my precious traffic for all these TCP & HTTP headers, HTML, and more? Why not just use DNS to return Heads or Tails? And that's how we started creating a DNS-based coinflip service:

```bash
$ for i in {1..10}; do dig coin.heinemann.dev TXT @ns1.gentlent.net +short; done
"Tails"
"Heads"
"Heads"
"Heads"
"Tails"
"Tails"
"Heads"
"Heads"
"Tails"
"Heads"
```

Try it out! Just do a TXT query to `coin.heinemann.dev` and don't forget to  [visit my colleague's website](https://heinemann.dev) .

The short story of the DNS Coin Flip.

Tom Klein is a web and software developer and entrepreneur with lots of years of intense experience.  Worked with big enterprises and small companies. He loves to use new technologies.
