...especially at the expense of the excellent folks who run .SE, but wasn't I just writing last month about everything that can go wrong in a manually administered DNS environment?  In fact, didn't I specifically say:

"Use a trailing dot to prevent the origin from being appended to a domain name.  After editing a zone data file, increment the serial number and reload. Forget any one of those and you've caused an operational issue, maybe even an outage."

Well, it looks like .SE had one of those very problems.

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Over the past few years--I can't remember exactly when, which is part of the problem--I've become alarmingly forgetful.  I'll get up, walk across the building to do something, and forget completely what it was that I intended to do.  Talk to Julie about upcoming roundtables?  Ask Eric or Arlen a question about UI design?

That's a nuisance for me around the office, but it would be downright dangerous if anyone still let me manage a production zone or name server.

Even in the simplest DNS environments, there's a lot to remember:  An SOA record has seven RDATA fields.  Use a trailing dot to prevent the origin from being appended to a domain name.  After editing a zone data file, increment the serial number and reload. Forget any one of those and you've caused an operational issue, maybe even an outage.

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According to a DHS report cited in FT's Tech Blog, DNS is "the part of U.S. information technology most at risk from a serious attack." The report lists several "mitigations" of the threats against DNS, including monitoring, infrastructure diversity, anycast (called out by name!) and DNSSEC.

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The slides from this morning's webinars are now available for downloading!  Enjoy!

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Here are a few more answers:

The stub resolver doesn't usually set the DO bit.  A recursive name server with a trust anchor for a zone or following a delegation from a secure zone to a secure subzone sets the DO bit.  (It makes no sense, after all, for a recursive name server to set the DO bit on a query for an RRset in a zone that isn't signed.)  So if you want to make sure that a recursive name server sets DO for queries in a particular zone, configure a trust anchor for that zone.

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