Blogs

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

The 1H 2018 Schedule for DNS and BIND classes is posted.  There will be classes in Amsterdam, Redwood City, CA, New York City, and Zurich. These classes are delivered by Men and Mice, but cover the use of the BIND open source via CLI.  They are hands-on and have been very highly reviewed by past students. Here are the links

The Problem with DDNS and Dual Stack clients When clients obtain both and IPv4 and and IPv6 address, they generally wish that their hostname when added to DNS is the same, for both the v4 and the v6 address – i.e. they want, for the same name, for there to be both an A and a AAAA record. This is

We will be adding QNAME minimization in the next major version of named. QNAME minimization is described in IETF RFC #7816.  It is an important component of an overall DNS privacy strategy.  This project will make it possible for the operator of a BIND resolver to configure it to minimize unnecessary information leakage. Data leaked through DNS lookups is increasingly

In July 2017 we opened ISC’s RT bug database for public read-only browsing of BIND and ISC DHCP issues. New bugs submitted were still kept confidential by default, but issues that had been triaged, and feature requests, were publicly viewable. Now we want to take a further step towards transparency and welcoming community participation in the BIND project. We have

Spend your summer working on open source with ISC!   We’re excited that ISC has been selected as one of the participating organizations in this year’s Google Summer of Code program. We are proposing a number of worthwhile extensions to the Kea project.  Suggested projects will help you develop practical experience with C++, user interface design, REST api design and

ISC DHCP 4.4 is expected to be the last branch we create for ISC DHCP. The software is complete and stable, but it is difficult to extend it much further. The release of ISC DHCP 4.4.1 is the first release on the 4.4. branch, since 4.4.0 was withdrawn. This release contains several new features as well as a number of bug fixes.

BIND 9.12 is out! We had to hold onto this over the recent holiday period, while we were waiting for a window to publish a reported vulnerability and circulate patched versions. Finally, now we are able to post the BIND 9.12 final. 9.12 has new features (NSEC Aggressive use, Serve Stale, Response Policy Service Interface), updates to cryptography and improved

The recently announced Meltdown bug is a serious vulnerability in Intel CPUs that allows malicious programs to indirectly read information held within the kernel of the operating system via a cache-timing side channel attack. Mitigations for this bug have been released and (in Linux at least) these take the form of changes to the way that kernel memory is addressed

2017 was a good year for ISC! Keeping an open source project funded, keeping any small non-profit going, is always a challenge, and we are grateful to have succeeded in doing that for another year. We finished 2017 feeling pretty stable and cautiously optimistic about our on-going projects and ISC’s future.   Highlights of 2017 Staff changes: We hired a

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.” ― Ivan Turgenev Beta Testers Needed We rely on the user community for field testing. Please download the 4.4.0 beta version and report the results of your testing to dhcp-bugs at isc dot org.   The final 4.4.0 version will be posted in about