Even with SRV records, there’s still the problem of middleboxes restricting protocol traffic to certain ports. (There’s another comment thread in which we discuss this.) In practice, SRV records work much better inside network borders than on the larger Internet.

This has history: https://egopoly.com/2008/02/ssh-slow-on-leopard.html

I also know of https://github.com/Crosse/sshsrv and other tricks

I agree more SRV records would have helped with a tremendous number of unnecessary proxies and wasted heat energy from unnecessary computing, but in this day and age, I think ECH/ESNI-type functions should be considered for _every_ new protocol.

It’s also similar with mDNS on local networks. It’s actually nice!

Overall, DNS features are not always well implemented on most software stack.

A basic example is the fact that DNS resolution actually returns a list of IPs, and the client should be trying them sequentially or in parallel, so that one can be down without impact and annoying TTL propagation issues. Yet, many languages have a std lib giving you back a single IP, or a http client assuming only one, the first.

I love that kubernetes does this for cluster service domain names