Blogs

DNS Flag Day is a public-benefit movement, like a community trash pick up day in a common area everyone uses. Everyone who has and will participate in supporting this initiative should feel they have accomplished something worth-while. Some operators thought it was unwise that Flag Day was set for a Friday, and were taken by surprise by the level of

As a non-profit with few reserves, whether a year was a good one at ISC has a lot to do with our financial status. 2018 was a good year on that score. Most of our funding comes through software support contracts, and in 2018, our support business was strong. We gained 22 new support contracts and lost only 10. As

A number of DNS software and service providers have announced that we will all cease implementing DNS resolver workarounds to accommodate DNS authoritative systems that don’t follow the Extensions to DNS (EDNS) protocol. Each vendor has pledged to roll out this change in some version of their software by the ‘Flag Day.’ Changes coming in BIND BIND 9.13.4 and later

We wish all our customers, contributors, donors, and friends all the best for a wonderful holiday season and a very happy 2019. Thank you for your ongoing support of open source software for an open Internet!

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