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.