The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast

Episode 26

admin — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 21:18:36 +0000

In this (recorded-just-before) Christmas episode, Matt and Cricket discuss the occupational hazards of church organists during the holidays, and then answer Ed Horley’s question about DNS64’s effect on DNSSEC, David Dunleap’s question about a special DNS setup that might be due to the use of load balancing, and Victor Tran’s question about whether he needs to sign all of his name server’s zones at once. In the mean time, they reminisce over ancient and obscure methods of compressing and encoding files, and both react with dismay to the memory of driving in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Episode 25

admin — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 04:20:43 +0000

In this episode, Matt and Cricket attempt to answer all nine of Jorge Fábregas’s “couple of questions” in a lightning round. Then they swap war stories about all the travel they’ve been doing and have yet to do (implicitly offering excuses for the long gap between episodes), and finally – and inevitably – discuss Neal Stephenson’s new book, REAMDE.

Episode 24

admin — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 03:32:01 +0000

In this episode, Matt (having dodged Hurricane Irene) and Cricket (having recently returned from South America) grovel and scrape after a nearly-three-month hiatus, then answer questions from Jorge Fábregas about whether to allow ICMP to authoritative name servers; from Donnie Carvajal about how to resolve a private, internal domain name; and from Leo Vandewoestijne about mismatched NS RRsets. Along the way, they learn a nice trick from Leo about how to convey proper pronunciation to fellow Mac owners, lament their inability to pronounce their own surnames correctly, and probably cause Olafur Gudmundsson to spit coffee all over his laptop.

Episode 23

admin — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 22:42:32 +0000

In this star-studded episode, taped at Dyn Inc.’s second annual “Inside Baseball” event, Matt and Cricket are joined by a “who’s who” of DNS luminaries. They answer questions from Bob Harold (who previously received a tee shirt and does not want another) about whether CNAME records terminate a subtree of the namespace, from Warren Kumari about why a domain name that owns a CNAME record can’t own any other record types, from Wayne Ketterer about how to set up DNS so that a given domain name maps to one address internally and another externally, and from Canadian Todd about whether adding glue AAAA records is a good idea. Then the collected luminaries throw a few “stump the chump”-style questions at Matt and Cricket – a little like shooting fish in a barrel. Tune in to see how well they fare.

Note that the audio isn’t quite up to even our low standards, despite the best efforts of Matt and Tom Daly of Dyn to smuggle decent recording equipment across state lines, but it’s certainly listenable.

Episode 22

admin — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 04:38:52 +0000

After a respite carefully timed to avoid the Ides of March, Matt and Cricket answer Brian Mazzocco’s question about the meaning of strange, possibly European symbols in zone data files; address John Shin’s question about how validating, recursive name servers handle aliases from signed zones to unsigned zones; and assess Gavin Brown’s suggestion for automatically bootstrapping DS records from a signed child zone into its parent.

Episode 21

cricket — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 05:02:20 +0000

In this mercifully digression-free episode – perhaps not coincidentally taped in-person in Cricket’s office in Santa Clara – Matt and Cricket answer Josh Baverstock’s umpteenth question, this one about storing certificates in DNS, as well as Dirck Copeland’s and Bob Harold’s related questions about bad delegations. Josh, Dirck and Bob will each receive a handsome black Practice Safe DNS tee shirt courtesy the Public Interest Registry. If we’ve got the right sizes, that is.

Episode 20

cricket — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 03:26:30 +0000

In this episode, Matt and Cricket answer Dana S’s question (submitted from Kurdistan!) about the wisdom (or folly) of implementing an OpenDNS-like system using multiple views, as well as Alex Wilkinson’s questions about what all those SRV records that Domain Controllers register are for and whether BIND name servers can serve them, and which tools they recommend for troubleshooting DNS problems. Along the way, they plug several web-based troubleshooting tools, including VeriSign’s http://www.dnssec-debugger.com/, Casey Deccio’s http://www.dnsviz.net/ and Infoblox’s http://www.dnsadvisor.com/.

But most importantly, they extend an offer of a free black tee shirt (and you can’t have enough of those!) to anyone submitting a question to Mr. DNS that’s answered on a forthcoming podcast! And if that’s not enough, listeners can also hear Matt best Cricket’s knowledge of Bay Area trivia with an obscure fact about the Westin St. Francis.

Episode 19

cricket — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 04:33:23 +0000

In this episode, Matt and Cricket beseech their legion of listeners to submit more questions, then turn Jeremy Laidman’s question about conditionally forwarding a subzone into an exhaustive (and somewhat exhausting) discussion of the history of BIND and conditional forwarding, and how to use conditional forwarding to build robust name resolution architectures. Then they address Jesus Cea’s question about how to goad his provider of secondary name service into supporting DNSSEC. In the process, they digress into the influence of “Top Gear” on impressionable youth, somewhat impractical advice on how HP could improve route aggregation through strategic acquisitions, and a comparison of various syndicated advice columnists.

Episode 18

cricket — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:22:23 +0000

In this podcast, Matt and Cricket answer Leen Besselink’s question about the viability of Dan Kaminsky’s proposed use of a clever DNSCurve concept in DNSSEC, and Matt offers his high opinion of the Dutch people (surely risking retribution by his Swedish countrymen). Then they turn to Josh Baverstock’s question about why the LOC record failed to catch on, despite its obvious utility to cruise missiles with stub resolvers. Finally, in yet another of their “Why, back in my day…” sessions, they lament the loss of summer vacations that lasted through Labor Day.

Episode 17

cricket — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:37:59 +0000

In this episode, Matt and Cricket reveal the first R-rated movies they saw and the circumstances in which they saw them. Oh, and they answer Rob Szarka’s question about the maximum number of NS records a zone can contain and Matt’s unnamed colleague’s question about why we need intrazone NS records at all. Then Matt gives us an insider’s look at the Root Zone’s Key Ceremony.