Blogs

Speed, Agility, Accuracy Network administrators are under pressure to streamline provisioning of new devices so they can scale up, deploy new services, or otherwise make the network serve changing business needs faster than ever. The key to achieving this new speed and flexibility is centralized configuration control. In Kea 1.5 (Download, Release notes) we have enabled a standardized provisioning interface

There is a fundamental flaw in the way that some web server operators use the DNS to identify the IP address of the web servers to which they connect. This article attempts to explain and justify this assertion. Until quite recently the web site for a domain name would usually be hosted on a server named “www” on that domain.

If you’ve visited ISC’s GitLab instance in the last few days, you may have noticed something: BIND 9 has a new logo! In fact, this is the first time that BIND 9 has had a logo at all, despite the fact that the software has been in development since 2000. So why now?   BIND 9 is ISC’s flagship product

ISC is pleased to release its 2016-2017 annual report. We are proud to share our accomplishments from the two-year period and look ahead to the future. We took steps to ensure our continued success and are well-positioned for steady growth in 2018 and beyond. We encourage everyone to read our annual report and give us your feedback at marketing@isc.org. And,

Interest in YANG models for standardizing device configuration is exploding at the IETF. At last week’s IETF meeting in Bangkok there were many new drafts proposing YANG support for various technologies.  This beta version of Kea features our first ISC YANG model support, for DHCPv4 and DHCPv6. We are also integrating with Sysrepo, another open source project, that implements a

In my previous blog article I talked about the need to generate an even spread of traffic across the queues of a modern multi-core NIC to achieve optimal performance. The Intel X710 cards that we use in our performance testing lab distribute the packets to queues based on the value of a hash calculated for each incoming packet based on the source

Report from the Kea Hackathon in Gdańsk last week: We spent the first day of the hackathon working on the overall design for the management API for the ‘configuration in the database backend’ feature coming in Kea 1.5, among other things. The discussion was around whether to overload the current existing subnet management commands, or to create a new set

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