monthly archive

ISC in Africa

02 Jun 2012
McTim

ISC has always been supportive of Internet infrastructure development in Africa. In addition to being the first root-server operator to offer anycast instances in Africa, we have long provided Secondary Name Services (SNS) to a number of African ccTLDs as part of our public benefit mission. We have also sent our staff to AfNOG meetings to help in training on our FOSS (BIND and DHCP).

A Word About Windows Binary BIND Distributions and OpenSSL Libraries

21 May 2012
ISC Support

At ISC we have recently received several inquiries from customers who are using the binary packages of BIND that we distribute for Microsoft Windows. They have expressed concerns about security vulnerabilities present in older versions of OpenSSL.  BIND uses OpenSSL for securing communications between dynamic nameservers and clients and between master servers and slave servers.  To support this functionality, ISC uses functionality from the OpenSSL libraries and ships libraries from the OpenSSL package with binary distributions of BIND.

BIND 9.9 - why should you care?

02 Mar 2012
João Damas

BIND 9.9 is a new release of the gold standard for DNS servers on the Internet. It builds on a tried and trusted platform that has been evolving and maturing over more than 10 years and has kept adding new powerful and useful features with each new release.

In BIND 9.9 we have introduce several new features that can make a difference to how you operate your DNS service, no matter what size of an installation you have. Here is a brief rundown of why you should care about this new version:

Improved performance

TechWomen Mentor - The Power of Mentoring - Looking Forward

27 Jan 2012
Larissa Shapiro

I was so honored to participate in the TechWomen mentoring program in the summer of 2011. Meeting and working with my mentee, Sanae Baatti from Morocco, was a life changing experience. I wrote some about the TechWomen experience last summer. I was deeply honored as well, to travel to Morocco last fall with a state department sponsored TechWomen mentor and mentee delegation.

Routing configuration over DHCPv6

08 Nov 2011
Tomek Mrugalski

Currently the DHCPv6 protocol does not allow the provisioning of any routing-related information to hosts. A new proposal is addressing this shortcoming. The draft draft-ietf-mif-dhcpv6-route-option defines a mechanism for delivering routing information over the DHCPv6 protocol. This article explains core concepts and explains how to use the ISC DHCP software to deliver such information.

BIND 9.9.0b2 -- a feature update

22 Nov 2011
by Evan Hunt

Today, ISC is publishing a new beta release of BIND 9.9.0.  As several new features have been added since the feature preview I posted on the occasion of the first alpha release, it would seem to be a good time for an update.

Protecting Intellectual Property is Good; Mandatory DNS Filtering is Bad

12 Oct 2011
vixie

It has been about six months since I got together with four of my friends from the DNS world and we co-authored a white paper which explains the technical problems with mandated DNS filtering. The legislation we were responding to was S. 968, also called the PROTECT-IP act, which was introduced this year in the U. S. Senate. By all accounts we can expect a similar U. S. House of Representatives bill soon, so we've written a letter to both the House and Senate, renewing and updating our concerns.

Other Uses for Secure DNS

13 Oct 2011
vixie

In the October 2011 issue of the Usenix Associations ";login:" newsletter, I published an article entitled "Other Uses for Secure DNS", with special attention to the IETF DANE working group and the proposed protocol for replacing the X.509 certificate authority system with a secure and scalable system based on Secure DNS.

A reprint of article is attached below.

TechWoman in Marrakesh-an October '11 update

16 Oct 2011
Larissa Shapiro

As I wrote in June (link to my last techwomen blog), I've been deeply honored this year to participate in the inaugural round of the TechWomen initiative, a program of the US State Department, as a technical mentor.

Origin ASN for Anycasted Services

26 Sep 2011
Leo Bicknell

 There is a new draft from the IETF GROW working group that attempts to standardize how Anycasted services manage their routing announcements.  The draft can be found at:

ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-grow-unique-origin-as-01.txt

Before commenting directly on the draft a review of how ISC operates the F-Root Anycast network is in order.