DNS Evolution: Innovation or Fragmentation?

There is no single name system that is necessarily bound to the Internet. Unlike IP addresses which are in every IP packet, names are an application construct, and, in theory, applications have considerable latitude in how they handle such names. There could be many name systems that could coexist within…


Fragmentation

One of the discussion topics at the recent ICANN 75 meeting was an old favourite of mine, namely the topic of Internet Fragmentation. Here, I’d like to explore this topic in a little more detail and look behind the kneejerk response of declaiming fragmentation as bad under any and all…


DoH, DoT and Plain old DNS

The evolution of the DNS name resolution environment has seen the DNS recursive resolver moving further away from the end client, with an Internet segment often being interposed between the client and the recursive resolver. The combination of an open DNS protocol and a public Internet segment between the client…


Notes from DNS-OARC-38

As I see it, the DNS is the last remaining piece of glue that binds the Internet together. We lost IP address coherency within the Internet many years ago and the DNS is all that’s left. Consequently, the DNS is vital for the Internet. Perhaps the most critical question to…


The Path to Resolverless DNS

There is an intriguing mention of “Server Push” in the specification of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) (RFC 8484). The RFC is somewhat vague in the description of server push, apart from noting a caveat that “extra care must be taken to ensure that the pushed URI is one that the…


DNS-OARC 37

There was a meeting of DNS Operations and Research group in February, DNS-OARC 37. These are my notes from the presentations that I found to be of interest. Zone File Bug Hunting The DNS is deceptively simple. Simple, in that are few choices in how to configure the zone information…


DNS4EU

The last few decades have not been a story of unqualified success for European technology enterprises. The European industrial giants of the old telephone world, such as the former stalwarts Alcatel, Siemens, Philips, Ericsson and Nokia, have found it to be extraordinarily difficult to translate their former dominant positions in…


ICANN DNS Symposium

ICANN hosted a Resolver Operator Forum in mid-December, and the session had several interesting presentations that I would like to comment on here. DNS Resolver Evolution The first presentation in this forum was from Paul Mockapetris. He pointed to the original academic published paper, Development of the Domain Name System,…


DNS-OARC 36

It’s conference and workshop season right now, and November has been unusually busy this year. At the end of the month was the DNS Operations and Research meeting, DNS-OARC 36. These are my notes from those presentations that I found to be of interest. Slack’s DNSSEC Debacle It’s a pretty…


DINR 2021

From the recent writeup of the DNS work at the IETF its clear that there is a large amount of attention being focussed on the DNS. It’s not just an IETF conversation, or a DNS OARC conversation, but a conversation that involves a considerable amount of research activity as well.…