Tony Finch – blog

Today I travelled to Amsterdam for a bunch of conferences. This weekend there is a joint DNS-OARC and CENTR workshop, and Monday - Friday there is a RIPE meeting.

The DNS Operations Analysis and Research Centre holds peripatetic workshops a few times a year, usually just before an ICANN or RIR meeting. They are always super interesting and relevant to my work, but usually a very long way away, so I make do with looking at the slides and other meeting materials from afar.

CENTR is the association of European country-code TLD registries. Way above my level :-)

RIPE is the regional Internet registry for Europe and the Middle East. Earlier this year, the University of Cambridge became a local Internet registry (i.e. an organization responsible for sub-allocating IP address space) and new members get a couple of free tickets to a RIPE meeting. RIPE meetings also usually have a lot of interesting presentations, and there’s a DNS track which is super relevant to me.

I haven’t been to any of these meetings before, so it’s a bit of an adventure, though I know quite a lot of the people who will be here from other meetings! This week I’ve been doing some bits and bobs that I hope to talk about with other DNS people while I am here.

doh101

Last month I deployed DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS on the University’s central DNS recolvers. This turned out to be a bit more interesting than expected, mainly because a number of Android users started automatically using it straight away. Ólafur Guðmundsson from Cloudflare is talking about DoH and DoT tomorrow, and I’m planning to do a lightning talk on Sunday about my experience. So on Wednesday I gathered some up-to-to-date stats, including the undergraduates who were not yet around last month.

(My DoT stats are a bit feeble at the moment because I need full query logs to get a proper idea of what is going on, but they are usually turned off.)

Rollover

Yesterday evening was the belated DNSSEC root key rollover. There are some interesting graphs produced by [SIDN labs[(https://www.sidnlabs.nl/) and NLnet Labs on the NLnet Labs home page. These stats are gathered using RIPE Atlas which is a distributed Internet measurement platform.

I found the rollover very distracting, although it was mostly quite boring, which is exactly what it should be!

ANAME

The IETF dnsop working group is collectively unhappy with the recently expired ANAME draft - including at least some of the draft authors. Since this is something dear to my heart (because web site aliases are one of the more troublesome parts of my job, and I want better features in the DNS to help make the trouble go away) I spent most of this week turning my simplified ANAME proposal into a proper draft.

I’m hoping to discuss it with a few people (including some of the existing draft authors) with the aim of submitting the revised draft before the deadline on Monday 22nd for next month’s IETF meeting.