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Celarent Darii writes: There is a vulnerability in the latest ubuntu distributions due to the DNS resolver included in systemd. The inclusion of the dns resolver was lamented by many on the mailing list, not without cause. All are advised to update their distribution.

An anonymous reader notes the coming milestone of May 5, at 17:00 UTC — at this time DNSSEC will be rolled out across all 13 root servers. Some Internet users, especially those inside corporations and behind smaller ISPs, may experience intermittent problems. The reason is that some older networking equipment is preconfigured to block any reply to a DNS request that exceeds 512 bytes in size. DNSSEC replies are typically four times as large. "DNSSEC is in fact already rolled out across most of the world's 13 root servers. ... But to date ... it would only have resulted in a slight lag in the loading of a web page for those with outdated network equipment. The beauty of DNS is that should a request made to one root server not receive a response, the DNS resolver on a user's machine simply makes the same request along the line of the 13 root servers until it gets a satisfactory response. But on May 5, once all 13 root servers are live with the DNSSEC signatures, responses from all 13 root servers won't make it back inside the corporate LAN on some older systems. ... The problem may take several days to surface and be inconsistent from one user's PC to the next. A user at one machine who hasn't switched on his PC for two or three days will have no access to the Internet. A user who left his machine on the night before will have some pages — and responses from DNS servers — cached on his machine, and will still have connectivity." The article links a test site you can use ahead of time to check for any problems.

Raindeer writes "Commercial DNS software provider Nominum, in an effort to promote its new cloud-based DNS service, SKYE, has slandered all open source/freeware DNS packages. It said: 'Given all the nasty things that have happened this year, freeware is a recipe for problems, and it's just going to get worse. ... So, whether it's Eircom in Ireland or a Brazilian ISP that was attacked earlier this year, all of them were using some variant of freeware. Freeware is not akin to malware, but is opening up those customers to problems.' This has the DNS community fuming. Especially when you consider that Nominum was one of the companies affected by the DNS cache poisoning problem of last year, something PowerDNS, MaraDNS and DJBDNS (all open source) weren't vulnerable to."