The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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…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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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