The DNSheads Vienna is an informal group of people who are responsible for the operation and the software development of recursive and authoritative DNS servers. Founded by Head of nic.at R&D Alexander Mayrhofer, the group has already met 6 times to discuss the changing landscape of DNS. A review.

Almost 20 DNS experts met on 12th June in nic.at’s Viennese office for the 6th DNSheads Vienna meetup. After a short welcome from Alex Mayrhofer, Head of nic.at R&D, Christoph and Martin from appliedprivacy shared their experiences in operating public DNS over HTTPs (DoH) Servers. They have tested various implementations. At the moment the DoH-server operated by appliedprivacy (see https://appliedprivacy.net/services/dns/)  has up to 150 simultaneous sessions. Curiously enough, the server from users from Indonesia is the most popular one – this is due to a mobile privacy app.

Dimitry Klesev from nic.at’s R&D team gave a presentation about the integration of the RcodeZero DNS network into the container orchestration solution „Kubernetes“. With the help of components developed by nic.at, public services which are running on a Kubernetes Cluster can be added automatically to DNS. This avoids theneed for a manual interaction when deploying Kubernetes services.

Hans Mayer from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) talked about monitoring DNS queries with Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana. These tools help him to detect abnormalities in the DNS traffic to his four DNS servers that he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to see. He discovered „strange“ queries from Cisco Webex which were repaired following his enquiry to Cisco.

Finally Alexander Mayrhofer from nic.at gave an overview on his recent research results around the measuring scale „DNS Magnitude“. In his research he compared DNS traffic on authoritative .at servers with .at-queries on the root servers. In a second comparison the stability of the magnitude scale could be checked against TTL changes of domains. It showed that the scale remains stable even if the underlying TTL is strongly modified.

The DNSheads Vienna meetups take place every 3-4 months and are organised and sponsored by nic.at. In the meantime this model has been copied by other registries in Switzerland and Belgium. Interested persons can join the public Meetup group here https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/DNSheads-Vienna/  and stay informed about the upcoming meetings.

Find all presentations there:
• Welcome: https://www.slideshare.net/AlexMayrhofer/dnsheads-vienna-6
• DoH Server Experiences: https://appliedprivacy.net/files/2019-06-12_DNSheads_Vienna_DoH_Server_Software_Experiences.pdf
• DNS Magnitude - impact of TTL: https://www.slideshare.net/AlexMayrhofer/dns-magnitude-dnsheads-vienna-6