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Interview With Paul Vixie And David Conrad

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the making-the-names-work dept.

rwm311 writes: "linuxsecurity.com is running an interview with [Paul Vixie] and [David Conrad] about the ISC and BINDv9. It's a pretty good read. Vixie talks about his days at DEC and his motivation behind BIND while both Vixie and Conrad speak of the future of BIND - features they would like to implement and things that will be going away (such as nslookup)."

5 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Security by MikeBabcock · · Score: 3

    Their comments about security are quite irritating because they mention things like DNSSEC but don't want to talk about the way BIND is coded. DJBDNS comes up (http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html) but is brushed off with false claims (it does support transfers, and support for IPv6 is in the works).

    --
    - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
    1. Re:security by MSG · · Score: 3

      is it just me, or does the concept of security as a "side effect" seem very frightening?

      Maybe it's just you. Good programmers know that stable, correct code is the cure for 99% of all security problems. The other bit is security problems due to design flaws (such flaws would exist in the RFC, for example).

      If you spend the time required to do something _right_, if you make the code robust and stable, then it will be secure. It IS a side effect of programming for stability.

  2. Amusing quote by Azog · · Score: 5
    David Conrad: I look forward to seeing significantly increased use and interest in developing applications based on the RSA algorithm. Hopefully, the easing of US crypto controls earlier this year doesn't mean that someone has figured out how to factor large primes trivially... :-)
    Er, Mr. Conrad, I can factor large primes trivially...

    Seems like everyone makes this mistake sooner or later!

    (for the confused: he meant "factor products of large primes trivially".)


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
    --
    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
    "HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
  3. security by Phexro · · Score: 5

    on security:

    "...it was an indirect goal. We wanted to produce a rock solid, commercial grade, open source DNS implementation in the tradition of BIND..."

    translation: bind 9 will be just as buggy as the old bind!

    "...and with high compatibility with BIND. One important side effect of all that is security."

    is it just me, or does the concept of security as a "side effect" seem very frightening?

    you'd think that with all the problems in the past with bind, they would have considered security to be a primary goal, not a "side effect".
    --

  4. nslookup by Adam+Wiggins · · Score: 3

    The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of U C Berkeley grad students was still at the core of BIND.

    Interesting, I didn't expect them to admit to that sort of thing.

    And it's not really that nslookup is going away, at least not the way that I think of it (a command line tool to quickly find an IP address) - they indicate that it was because nslookup currently is closely mapped to the BIND8 API which has been changed all around. I think they want something more abstract which will allow users to get the info they want without being closely tied to the underlying protocol. (Abstraction! Egad!)

    All in all, it sounds like good news.