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PODCAST · technology

The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast

by Matt Larson and Cricket Liu

Everything you ever wanted to know about DNS. And other things.

Publisher-supplied feed metadata · PodParley refreshed Jan 16, 2023 · Source feed

Episodes

  1. Episode 65

    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...

  2. Episode 64

    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…

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  3. Bumping the feed…

    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....

  4. Episode 63

    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,”...

  5. Episode 62

    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...

  6. Episode 61

    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...

  7. Episode 60

    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...

  8. Episode 59

    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…

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  9. Episode 58

    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...

  10. Episode 57

    …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...

  11. Episode 56

    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...

  12. Episode 55

    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…

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  13. Episode 53

    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…

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  14. Episode 52

    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...

  15. Episode 51

    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…

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  16. Episode 50

    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...

  17. Episode 49

    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...

  18. Episode 48

    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…

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  19. Episode 47

    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...

  20. Episode 46

    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...

  21. Episode 45

    We’re back again, scraping the bottom of the mailbag for questions. Erik Radde helped us out with a question on the interaction of wildcards and the search list, and Lenny Tropiano tweeted a question at Mr. DNS about Dyn’s support for a feature that provides CNAME-like semantics at a zone apex....

  22. Episode 44

    Well, we said we’d try to keep to a monthly schedule, and we arguably just made it! This episode, number 44, features a special guest: Andrew Sullivan, Matt’s colleague at Dyn and Chair of the Internet Architecture Board. Now, if we’d planned ahead and let you know Andrew was going to be on the...

  23. Episode 43

    In this, our holiday episode, we’re joined by returning special guest, Duane Wessels, who discusses a recent event involving the root name servers and a lot of obviously spoofed traffic, as well as his ongoing work in the IETF around DNS privacy. We reach into the mail bag and find a question…

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  24. Episode 42

    In Episode 42, we discuss the meaning of life, the universe and everything with a very special guest, @dnsreactions, creator of the hit DNS Reactions Tumblr. “DR”, as we call him or her (or it?), prefers to stay anonymous, so we have obscured his/her/its voice using the magic of technology. Our...

  25. Episode 41

    Welcome to our special Halloween episode! Okay, not really, but we are recording in late October… This time we answer a record-breaking three questions from the same listener, Grant Taylor, who single-handedly supplied the material for all our tangents in this show. We remind everyone of the...

  26. Episode 40

    In this 40th episode–a milestone!–Matt and Cricket answer long-suffering listener Grant Taylor’s question about sorting replies by type and wander into the Land of Happy Eyeballs, then explore an answer Joe Abley received from Mark Andrews of ISC. Meanwhile, a discussion of the term G-job causes...

  27. Episode 39

    In this star-studded episode, Matt and Cricket take advantage of a meeting of the DNS Cabal–that is, the annual “Inside Baseball” event–to answer Donald Rudder’s question about whether synthesizing NXDOMAIN responses to avoid random subdomain attacks would work with NSEC3 as well as NSEC records....

  28. Episode 38

    In this episode, long-time (and likely now sole) listener Yiorgos Adamopoulos asks about the the process of signing the root zone, which Mr. DNS has some experience with. Matt also recaps some of the goings-on at the latest DNS-OARC meeting in Amsterdam, omitting that which must stay in…

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  29. Episode 37

    Back after a long absence they try to avoid talking about, Cricket and Matt tackle some meat-and-potatoes questions: Why can’t one have a CNAME with other records at a domain name? Are registrars buying up expired domain names? How can one make a name server generate answers dynamically? Listen…

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  30. Episode 36

    In this episode, Matt and Cricket respond to Tommi Nikkilä’s followup to his original question about the legality of multiple CNAME records in a DNS answer, and then react to (to claim they “answer” it is a reach) dedicated listener Yiorgos Adamopoulos’s question about registering domain names…

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  31. Episode 35

    In this episode, Matt and Cricket wonder aloud whether they’ve lost their domestic audience, but then rally to answer questions from their remaining international listeners: Evaggelos Balaskas’s question about SRV records, Joe’s questions about resolver and name server fallback to TCP, and Tommi...

  32. Episode 34

    In this episode, Matt and Cricket answer Harry Stein’s question about a DNSstuff search that turned up suspected cache poisoning, and Kirk Davis’s question about Google’s (somewhat crazy) recommendations on how to force the use their non-SSL-based services.

  33. Episode 33

    Here, at long last, is Episode 33, in which Matt announces a “Development with a capital D” (and a lowercase “yn”), and Matt and Cricket answer questions from Jason Weber about how to deal with web hosting and a hosted DNS zone; from Chuck Nelis about split DNS; from Michael Simoni about the...

  34. Episode 32

    In this episode, Matt and Cricket answer questions (some posed on Twitter – please welcome Mr. DNS to the 21st Century) from ErrataRob about Verisign’s DNS infrastructure, from devoted listener Yiorgos Adamopoulos on the value of DNS certifications, and from Frederic Cambus about zone file access...

  35. Episode 31

    In this, their inaugural episode for 2013, Cricket and Matt answer a question from the mysterious “Joe” (if that is his real name) about the differences between BIND’s stub zone and conditional forwarding features, prompting some reminiscing about the good old days of BIND 8. This episode is the...

  36. Episode 30

    In this latest episode of our evidently-now-quarterly podcast, Matt and Cricket answer Donald Rudder’s question about how common the A6 record is and its effect on DNSSEC. Then they discuss the upcoming change of d.root-servers.net’s IPv4 address and the implications of that change. And despite...

  37. Episode 29

    In this episode, Matt and Cricket finally throw in the towel and give up on promising podcasts on any regular schedule. But they do manage to clear Mr. DNS’s mailbag, answering questions from Ismael Lezcano about the availability of good programming APIs for working with DNS and why BIND doesn’t...

  38. Episode 28

    In this (much delayed) episode, Matt and Cricket discuss the folly of trying to hew to a podcast-publishing schedule, and answer (or avoid) questions from Sevan Janiyan and Yiorgos Adamopoulos on what operating systems and software the root name servers run; from Kent Shuey on why a device that...

  39. Episode 27

    In this episode, Matt and Cricket answer Alan Frabutt’s question about the existence of recursive name servers that don’t honor TTLs – the “yeti” of recursive name servers – and Joe Conlin’s question about the right way to deal with abuse of your name server, and try to assist Louis Sterchi in…

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  40. Episode 26

    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...

  41. Episode 25

    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...

  42. Episode 24

    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…

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  43. Episode 23

    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...

  44. Episode 22

    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...

  45. Episode 21

    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…

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  46. Episode 20

    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…

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  47. Episode 19

    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...

  48. Episode 18

    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...

  49. Episode 17

    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…

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  50. Episode 16

    In this episode, for the first time ever, Matt and Cricket are joined by a dozen DNS dignitaries to answer a question from Alejandro Acosta about when to plug trust anchors into his name servers’ configurations and begin validating, and Bob Lee’s question about which tools to use to check his…

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ABOUT THIS SHOW

Everything you ever wanted to know about DNS. And other things.

HOSTED BY

Matt Larson and Cricket Liu

CATEGORIES

Frequently Asked Questions

How many episodes does The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast have?

The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast currently has 63 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.

What is The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast about?

Everything you ever wanted to know about DNS. And other things.

How often does The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast release new episodes?

The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast has 63 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.

Where can I listen to The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast?

You can listen to The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.

Who hosts The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast?

The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast is created and hosted by Matt Larson and Cricket Liu.
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