In this episode, Matt and Cricket are joined by Ulrich Wisser, a colleague of Matt’s at ICANN. Ulrich explains the latest efforts in the area of DNSSEC automation, including CDS, CDNSKEY and now even CSYNC records and how they’re used. Ulrich mentions a Github repo that includes a list of registries, registrars, DNS providers and software that support DNSSEC automation; and an SSAC report on DS record automation.



This very informative section gradually devolves into amusing (for us, anyway) recollections of attempts to “tamper” various hardware security modules.



Toward the end, as is their wont (and when do you ever hear the word “wont” except in that context?), Matt and Cricket profess their childlike excitement over the upcoming “Murderbot” series, and Matt admits (much to Cricket’s astonishment) that he has never read “Dune.”

In this episode, Matt and Cricket are joined by Renée Burton, Infoblox’s Vice President of Threat Intelligence. They briefly introduce Protective DNS and its advantages as a security mechanism, then talk about threat feeds and how they’re created, and finally discuss Renée’s team and their work on analyzing Passive DNS data and DNS metadata to detect–and in some cases predict–the malicious use of DNS.



Toward the end, they segue (or perhaps “lapse”?) into a meandering discussion of Neal Stephenson’s “Polostan” (Cricket is, embarrassingly, stuck), Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse series (which Matt recommends), von Neumann probes (which Cricket either had not heard of or did not remember, necessitating an explanation from Matt, and which illustrate John von Neumann’s incredible mind and remarkable versatility), “Silo” (because Cricket is still not over Rebecca Ferguson–see episode 63) and AppleTV+’s run of other worthwhile shows, including “Slow Horses,” “Bad Monkey,” and “For All Mankind.”

To make good on a new year’s resolution, Mr. DNS recently put on his system administrator hat and upgraded his creaky WordPress installation. (Why does Mr. DNS insist on running his own WordPress installation rather than putting it in the new-fangled cloud that’s so popular these days? Well, Mr. DNS is a creature of habit and stuck in his ways. He will not discuss this topic further.) The upgrade appeared to go without incident, but alas, it was not so. Mr. DNS is grateful to eagled-eyed listener Lyle Tagawa, who noticed that Mr. DNS’s beloved podcast logo no longer appeared in the feed. Mr. DNS dived back into the depths of WordPress and emerged victorious, or so he thought. The default logo remained in some obstinate podcast clients. His many seconds of Internet research leads him to believe that publishing a post will cause podcast clients of the world to fetch and once again display the beloved logo. Thus he writes this post and its accompanying sound file with…one second of silence. He hopes you are not terribly disappointed to find the written rather than spoken word in the feed. He promises another episode will arrive at some future date, but he has learned never to commit to a particular time: one cannot rush the process.

In this episode, Matt and Cricket are joined by Professor Casey Deccio, of DNSViz and now Brigham Young University fame. (Matt is embarrassed and sorry that he misremembered and called Casey’s magnum opus “DNSSECViz” by mistake.) They tackle a listener’s question about a recent “DNS outage,” examining the causes of both Facebook’s and Slack’s failures and how they might have been avoided. Then they dive into recent developments in sci-fi and fantasy, including “Dune” (thumbs-up from Cricket), “Foundation,” Charles Stross’s “The Merchant Princes” series, and Cixin Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy.” (During this latter segment, Cricket might have gone on for a little too long about Rebecca Ferguson.)
 

In this episode, Matt and Cricket are joined by Graeme Bunton, director of the newly formed DNS Abuse Institute.  Graeme describes his background and explains the mission of the institute and what they’re working on.  And we finally (sort of) answer a long-suffering listener’s question about producing a kind of “Compleat DNS Specifications RFC” and ramble on for a bit about two great new sci-fi books, Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (which Matt mistakenly called the “Hail Mary Project”…) and Martha Wells’s Fugitive Telemetry.
Oh, and the lengthy hiatus? We shan’t speak of it.
 

In this episode, Matt and Cricket are joined by Kim Davies of ICANN and PTI (you’ll have to tune in to find out what that stands for).  Kim edifies us on key ceremonies and the Herculean efforts required to keep a key ceremony secure and transparent during what Matt referred to as a “global pandemic,” immediately regretting his use of the redundant phrase.  Later, Cricket is embarrassed to learn that Matt has already read both of the new books he’s reading (John Scalzi’s “The Last Emperox” and Martha Wells’s latest in the Murderbot series, “Network Effect“), and Kim laments that the end of business travel leaves him with no time to watch anything.  Oh, and the guys (or Matt, really) answer a really good question from Swapneel Patnekar about an ICANN paper on the effects of COVID-19 on the root name servers.
If you’ve already listened to the episode and are interested in the resources Kim referred to, here are the links:

* Attending a ceremony.
* Volunteering to be a Trusted Community Representative.
* ICANN’s blog post on the COVID-19-impacted ceremony.

We’re back with special guest Joe Abley, CTO of PIR, the registry for .ORG. We talk DNSSEC, research ideas, and more. Sadly, the mail bag was empty, but we still found more to talk about: DNS Flag Day 2020 is proposed to reduce fragmentation of DNS messages sent over UDP. Then Admiral Picard made an appearance, or was at least discussed. Finally, we urgently request your DNS questions at mrdns@ask-mrdns.com to fill the mail bag!

In this episode, Matt and Cricket are joined by Cricket’s recent co-author, John Belamaric, to discuss CoreDNS, a DNS server built to act as a service discovery engine in containerized environments, particularly those managed by the ubiquitous Kubernetes.  They also answer a question from Shane Kerr about why certain RR types insist on using canonical names in RDATA, and Cricket expresses his displeasure at the mispronunciation of “bailiwick.” Finally, they discuss “The Mandalorian,” and Cricket once again strongly recommends Taika Waititi’s movies, especially “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Jojo Rabbit.”

Another year brings another Inside Baseball event, where an ad hoc group of DNS industry insiders get together for a day to talk about current issues and then go to a baseball game (really). So many DNS-knowledgeable folks in one place had the makings of a great podcast episode, so we got out the recording gear and dived into the mailbag to answer four questions. In addition to Cricket and Matt, you’ll also hear Alex Dupuy, Dave Lawrence, Matt Pounsett, Rob Seastrom and John Todd.

…in which Matt and Cricket, in a cunning bit of Tom Sawyering, take Rob Fleischman’s question about how recursive DNS servers handle TTLs of zero, and induce Rob to both a) join the podcast as a guest and 2) paint their fence by doing all the legwork to find the answer.  In the inevitable light banter segment at the end of the episode, Cricket highly recommends Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows, likely the funniest vampire mockumentary ever made.

We’re back with an emergency episode published just in time to inform your frantic preparations for DNS Flag Day on 1 February 2019. We’re delighted to welcome another special guest, Petr Špaček from CZ.NIC, to fill us in and let us know if we should stockpile food for an impending Internet collapse and the ensuing end of civilization as we know it. Or maybe it’s just the story of a few DNS developers whose patience has finally run out. Then Matt recommends the Netflix show Babylon Berlin, and Cricket and Matt lament their years-long study of German with not nearly as much to show for it as we’d like.
 

We’re back after our longest hiatus yet. Alas, the mail bag was empty, so instead we invited special guest Paul Hoffman to talk about DNS over HTTPS (DoH), which has generated some buzz in the DNS community (to the extent that anything can generate buzz in the DNS community). We end with our usual pop culture consumption recap, this time focusing on what we’ve read recently (science fiction, unsurprisingly) and what shows we’ve watched in this new Golden Age of Television.

This isn’t exactly an episode, but Matt and Cricket recently recorded a short promo for Infoblox’s DNS Awareness Day campaign, and they decided to keep recording because Cricket wanted to hear about the recent DNSSEC Key Ceremony, in which Matt had served as the Ceremony Administrator.  So if you’re curious about how new root keys are generated and the sort of security that’s involved, tune in!
Oh, and there’s video, for the first time!

In this episode, number 52 (cards in a deck! And just wait till we hit 53, which has special significance!), Matt and Cricket are joined by a pantheon of the gods of DNS.  However, since they neglected to ask any of the speakers to introduce themselves, you’ll just have to guess, Band Aid “Do They Know It’s Christmas”-style, who’s who.  (Olafur’s basically a gimme–our Boy George or Bono.)  We answer David Mar’s question about how to learn the basics of DNS and then recap some of the topics of the Inside Baseball meeting we’d been attending, graciously hosted by Salesforce and organized by Allison Mankin & company.

In this episode, number 51, Matt and Cricket are joined by Kyle York and Joe Abley, respectively the Chief Strategy Officer and we-don’t-know-what of Dyn.  Kyle and Joe ably (ha!) fill in some of the details on the DDoS attack against Dyn on October 21 of last year.  And Kyle brags about the Patriots “dynasty,” which for three quarters sure looked like the pride that cometh before a fall, but holy cow!  Oh, and the guys jointly answer a question from Grant Taylor about a clever-but-frankly-awful way of adding a CNAME record to the apex of your zone and read a correction from Håkan Lindqvist about using underscores in certain fields of a cert.

In this episode, the 50th–their golden episode!–Matt and Cricket are joined by Dan York of the Internet Society, who brings them up to date on DNSSEC adoption.  Then the trio answer questions from Matt’s former colleague Rick Andrews about the use of underscores in domain names and from Ben Dash about how some companies get around the prohibition against adding CNAME records to zone apexes.  Apices.  Whatever.

Cricket and Matt took advantage of being in the same place for once to record the podcast, though that doesn’t stop us from forgetting which episode number we’re actually recording.  We answer four questions on subjects relating to SPF, DNSSEC, /etc/host.conf and authoritative server selection by recursive name servers.  On that last topic, Matt refers to research on server selection he contributed to and promised a link to the paper in the show notes.  The paper is “Authority Server Selection of DNS Caching Resolvers” and was published in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (CCR), April 2012.

In Episode 48, we are pleased to welcome Bert Hubert of PowerDNS fame to the show.  We reach into the mailbag to answer Nic Waller’s question about measuring which names in a zone are actually queried, Jesus Cea asked about proving domain ownership to obtain a Let’s Encrypt certificate (which caused us to do some actual research before recording!), and long-suffering listener Yiorgos Adamopoulos gamely sent in a question about using the block chain for name resolution.  As usual, we indulge in light banter completely unrelated to DNS, this time on outrageous cell phone roaming charges and Dutch pipe organs.
 

In this episode, our 47th, we realize the mailbag is actually fuller than we thought, and work diligently to answer questions from a “long-term” Swedish listener about IPv6 reverse mapping, from Jeremy Laidman about BIND 9.11’s new catalog zones feature, and from (the also likely Swedish) Håkan Lindqvist about the credibility of DNS data, particularly NS records.  We also digress into ruminating over the possible deleterious effects of The Disney Channel on the attitudes of tween daughters, why the first four minutes of the forthcoming “Sully” are likely the highlight of the film, and what we’ve been watching on TV lately.  Don’t miss it!

This episode, number 46, features a guest appearance from Roy Arends of ICANN, whom Matt, Roy’s boss, swears wasn’t forced to participate in our forsaken podcast after midnight Oxford time.  Roy’s worked on Unbound, fpdns, DNSSEC, and Nominet’s Turing product.  We answer questions from Jacob Evans about mismatched SOA records and name server support for IPv6 anycast, and from long-suffering listener Evaggelos Balaskas about Response Policy Zones and why he sees different responses to queries for A records for google.com.  Along the way, Matt announces his new job, and while tracing the origin of Matt’s pet phrase, “There has been no time,” a discussion of the term “shirt-tail relatives” ensues, during which Cricket forgets the word “commutativity.”