Managing BIND 9 - Webinar Series

Practical BIND 9 Management

BIND 9 can produce an extensive array of log messages and metrics. Experienced DNS administrators plan ahead to capture the most important metrics and logs, and to leverage available open source tools for capturing and analyzing them.

This series of five webinars, presented by Carsten Strotmann, will cover best practices and tips for monitoring and managing your BIND 9 deployment. Sessions 1, 2, and 3 are appropriate for both Authoritative and Recursive applications. Sessions 4 and 5 are primarily focused on Authoritative applications.

Register once for the entire series: all sessions will be recorded and the recordings posted within a few days on our website and our YouTube channel, so you can easily review any sessions you miss. Each session will last approximately one hour, including Q&A as time permits.

Sessions are scheduled at 8 AM PST, which is 16:00 UTC. However, Daylight Savings Time ends in the US on March 14 and not until March 28 in Europe. Please check your invite from Zoom for the correct time in your timezone.

Session Topics:

1. Feb 17: Monitoring, part 1 - Setting Up, Managing and Using Logs Recording

   • Best practice: BIND 9 log template for an authoritative server
   • Best practice: BIND 9 log template for a DNS resolver
   • File system best practices for BIND 9 log file handling
   • BIND 9 log analysis with Linux Systemd
   • Identifying hot-spots in BIND 9 logfiles with histograms
   • Condensing information from large BIND 9 logfiles with “logeater” tools
   • Monitoring BIND 9 runtime information with “atop”
   • Event-based BIND 9 log and system analysis
   • Incident-based DNSTAP and TCPDUMP traffic capture

   Note the templates Carsten recommends can be found at: https://webinar.defaultroutes.de/webinar/bind9-logging-template.html

   ISC Knowledgebase article that may be useful to review as well:

   • BIND logging, some basic recommendations

2. March 17: Monitoring, part 2 - Long-Term Statistics Monitoring and Log Analysis Recording

   • Identifying outliers in BIND 9 logfiles
   • BIND 9 monitoring from the “named.stats” file
   • BIND 9 monitoring with the statistics channel
   • Using open source tools to store and display metrics
   • Using open source tools to search and analyze logs
   • BIND 9 logs and remote syslog best practice
   • Best practices for metrics to monitor for authoritative and recursive

   ISC Knowledgebase articles that may be useful to review ahead of time include:

   • Best Practices for Recursive
   • Best Practices for Authoritative

3. April 21: Load Balancing With DNSdist Recording

   • Installation and configuration
   • Applications for DNSdist
   • Aggregating metrics across a cluster
   • Cache concentration
   • Load balancing for authoritative
   • Load balancing for resolver slides

   This webinar included a half hour hands-on lab, after the main presentation. The VMs used by the lab are no longer available, but the instructions are still available.

4. May 19: Dynamic Zones, part 1 - Basics Slides, Recording

   • Dynamic zones vs. static zones
   • Provisioning, updating dynamic zones

5. June 16: Dynamic Zones, part 2 - Advanced Topics Slides, Recording

   • TSIG
   • Updating ACLs with “grant”
   • Catalog zones

ISC is the developer and maintainer of the BIND 9 software system. This work is supported by software support contracts; no purchase is required to attend these training sessions or to download and use the open source. If your company or organization is interested in purchasing professional support for BIND 9 and supporting ISC’s development work, please complete our contact form.

Speaker Information:

Carsten Strotmann has 20 years of professional experience working in open source networking. He has delivered many webinars and training classes on open source solutions and DNS/DHCP/IPv6/Linux/Unix security. He also is the author of various articles on IT security topics in computer magazines.