The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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,” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

…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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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,” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]