March Meeting: BIND Name Server Administration

Date: March 4, 2008 at 7 p.m.
Location: Algonquin College (Woodroffe Campus), room T117

Speaker: Jean-Francois Messier

• What DNS is, and is NOT
• What WHOIS is, and is not
• IP address allocation, and domain ownership (briefly)
• What BIND is (with sample/dummy configuration files)
  • The type of records (A, NS, MX, PTR, TXT as well as TTL)
  • Config files
  • A little bit about dynamic DNS and DHCP
  • Shared secret for update exchange
• Free domain names and hosting (DynDNS, FreeDNS, etc)
• Implementing a cache DNS at home to speed up internet lookups.

I work in IT Security in the Federal Government. I've been heavily involved in firewall management, DNS maintenance and upgrade for Canadian Goverment-owned domains. I have been managing BIND-based DNS servers since 1998. I'm doing less right now, although I now manage my own domain using a web interface, which I will demonstrate. I was also involved in PKI since 1998, and cryptography. I'm rather limited in the level of details I can disclose, of course, by the nature of security.

I'm using Linux for several years now, mostly Ubuntu. I'm a big fan of Linux, although I'm not an expert.