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Name Server IP and a Dead Server

About 24 hours ago I rebooted the system that runs the secondary DNS for my zone and a few other zones. I’d upgraded a few things and the system had been running for almost 200 days without a reboot so it was time for it. Unfortunately it didn’t come back up.

Even more unfortunately the […]

Dynamic DNS

The Problem

My SE Linux Play Machine has been down for a couple of weeks. I’ve changed to a cheaper Internet access plan which also allows me to download a lot more data, but I don’t have a static IP address any more – and my ISP seems to change the IP a lot more […]

DNS Secondaries and Web Security

At the moment there are ongoing security issues related to web based services and DNS hijacking. the Daily Ack has a good summary of the session hijacking issue [1].

For a long time it has been generally accepted that you should configure a DNS server to not allow random machines on the Internet to copy […]

The New DNS Mess

The Age has an interesting article about proposed DNS changes [1].

Apparently ICANN is going to sell top level DNS names and a prediction has been made that they will cost more than $100,000 each. A suggestion for a potential use of this would be to have cities as top level names (a .paris TLD […]

BIND Stats

In Debian the BIND server will by default append statistics to the file /var/cache/bind/named.stats when the command rndc stats (which seems to be undocumented) is run. The default for RHEL4 seems to be /var/named/chroot/var/named/data/named_stats.txt.

The output will include the time-stamp of the log in the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (see my previous […]

Multiple DNS Names

There are many situations where multiple DNS names for a single IP address that runs a single service are useful. One common example is with business web servers that have both www.example.com and example.com being active, so whichever a customer hits they will get the right content (the last thing you want is for a […]

MX vs A record

One issue that has been the topic of some pointless discussion is whether a mail server should have an A record or an MX record. Mail can be delivered to a domain that has no MX record but simply an A record pointing to an IP address. But the most common practice is to have […]