DNS Planning in a pub...

Paul Robinson paul at iconoplex.co.uk
Wed Feb 20 10:46:31 GMT 2002


On Feb 19, Sam Smith <S at mSmith.net> wrote:

> I'm sure Rik will fill people in as he was the person
> who was writing things down....

He was indeed. Although key points were:

- Written in C, but in a *safe*manner* 
- some 'correctness' being shown (oooh! formal methods!)
- completely modular with well defined interfaces to allow for seperate
chroot'ing and configurability
- completely configurable information storage system, meaning you can
replace your bind zone files with a jpeg if that's what floats your boat
- at this stage, target is FBSD only, but with well defined interfaces
allowing for portability to be sorted out when somebody feels like it
- through modular approach, should allow for rapid development of new RFCs
and standards tracking
- config-definable cache size, but with 'hotlists' ensuring names that get
used a lot get quick responses for both authoritative and purely cacheing
DNS servers
- clever config file tricks like saying 'everything beginning with www.  
should point to THIS ip address' for easy setup in mass-hosting environments
- even cleverer tricks that I won't go into here 
- the /services clone Rik wants is still up for debate but I think I've
convinced him it should be turned off by default if it's implemented at all
(it's evil I tell you, completely EVIL!!!)
 
> They may even have decided on a name by the time they leave
> the pub :-)

Well, I still think 'Marmite' is a great name (you either love it or you 
hate it, and from the plans we've come up with I suspect that's what people 
will feel when they see it). Although other naming suggestions included:

Squelchy
Squishy
DeNSe
Manchester DNS (but we where scared people might think it had something to 
do with Manchester encoding or something)
Manky (as in Mancunian)
LOG (as in Lass O'Gowrie)
Lambert & Butler (we were getting drunk by now)
Cross & Blackwell (and still a bit peckish)
C*cksucker (to cause interesting arguments when management ask what DNS 
server you're running)
Wiggy's really great, dead ace, DNS server (because it's mine! all mine!)

err... that's it.

So, for now, it has no name. I did suggest amnesiac but I think that might 
send out the wrong messages for a name server.

-- 
Paul Robinson




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