The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast

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:

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 [email protected] 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.