Blogs

Network Interface Cards (NICs) often maintain multiple queues for transmitted and received packets and the Linux operating system kernel can be tuned to have each queue handled by a specific CPU core.  To obtain peak performance from a network service on modern multicore computer systems it’s desirable to ensure a balanced workload on each NIC queue and CPU core. The

We are going to start offering some additional binary packages for BIND9 on an experimental basis.  We already offer binaries for Windows users, which are very popular, and we have been hearing that some users of other operating systems would also like packages from ISC. Why are we doing this? For all open source users We want to make sure

The major changes in BIND 9.13 are related to code modernization. We have removed a number of workarounds and custom ‘fix-ups’ for broken, non-compliant and obsolete operating systems. Some of these workarounds add significant complexity, due to the need to to watch for and handle exceptions. Most of these workarounds are virtually untestable, which means that over time they become

It is often asked, “why can’t I have a CNAME at the zone apex?” This article explains why you can’t do that, and then continues with a discussion of potential alternatives. The use case for wanting a CNAME at a zone apex is typically one where an organization would like to have their web content hosted and provisioned by a

ISC’s training partner, Men & Mice, has announced public courses for September through November, in Amsterdam, Geneva, Denver, San Francisco area, and Zurich. ISC Support Customers are eligible for discounted or free training. The courses, originally jointly developed by Men & Mice and the ISC, are hands-on and have been highly reviewed by past students. In the first half of

The Kea team is participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) for the first time.  The GSOC program pays University students to spend their summer working on an open source project. This year, according to Google, the GSOC program is sponsoring 1,264 students from 62 countries working with 206 open source organizations. Students are encouraged to take the lead in

Kea 1.4 is ready for download and use. This is a big release, with several significant new features.   For users who have adopted Kea because they love the database back end, for lease and host reservations storage, we have added a new database and improved our statistics:   Cassandra Kea has had experimental support for an Apache Cassandra database

The IETF standards community regards the possibility of pervasive monitoring as an attack on the Internet and there is strong consensus among IETF participants that we must protect Internet users’ privacy. We were wondering whether the people who are operating DNS services were feeling a similar sense of urgency, and if they had any significant concerns about obstacles to deployment.

We are excited to share our latest Kea release, Kea 1.4.  This is the beta test version, posted so users and prospective users can do some testing and give us feedback. We anticipate posting a final version on June 15th, so please get us your feedback in time to make any needed changes. New Features in 1.4 Database improvements Many

Like many responsible organizations with an on-line presence, we have been preparing to meet our new obligations under GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations – it’s an EU thing).  We are a small business with less than 30 employees and no business activities located in Europe. We are committed to transparency because we care about public trust in ISC: we also

ISC has a long history of participating in hackathons, starting a long time ago at Gdansk University, and continuing with IETF Hackathons. Every time the goal was similar: spend a day or two playing with a new technology, concept or idea to see whether it makes sense, how to possibly extend Kea to support it properly and gain some experience.

Extension Mechanisms for DNS were standardized in 2013 Despite this, there continue to be non-compliant implementations.  DNS software developers have tried to solve the problems with the interoperability of the DNS protocol and especially its EDNS extension (RFC 6891 standard) by various workarounds for non-standard behaviors. However, temporary workarounds are not a long-term solution. These workarounds excessively complicate DNS software and are