April 2010 Archives

DNSSEC Transitions and the Signing of ARPA

15 Apr 2010
by Evan Hunt

2010 is shaping up to be a banner year in at least two areas: major steps toward the deployment of DNSSEC, and discoveries of operational snags affecting the deployment of DNSSEC.

An example of the former took place on March 25, when it was announced that the ARPA TLD had been signed. ARPA contains the sub-zones in-addr.arpa and ip6.arpa, which are used for reverse DNS: converting IP addresses to DNS names. It is an essential piece of the DNS infrastructure, and the signing of ARPA makes it possible for reverse lookups to be cryptographically authenticated via DNSSEC.

Unfortunately, an example of the latter took place a short time later.

Why SQLite3?

19 Apr 2010
Michael Graff

There have been some questions about why BIND 10's first milestone release only supports SQLite3 for storing zone information. I hope I can answer some of the questions by explaining how and why we came to this decision.

Part of the decision was a simple matter of time. We knew we would only have resources to implement a single data store. We ended up implementing two, but one is a trivial one: authors.bind and other static zone content.

That explains why we chose to implement only one, but why was it SQLite3?