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Nominum Calls Open Source DNS "a Recipe For Problems"

Posted by Soulskill on from the dem's-fightin'-woids dept.

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."

3 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Even if what they say is true... by jggimi · · Score: 4, Informative

    Bind is ISC licensed, which is similar to a BSD license. Disclosure is not required. See this example template.

  2. Re:Is this the same Nominum? by CTachyon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Isn't Nominum that company that was formed about ten years ago for the purpose of developing the open source BIND and DHCP for ISC?

    Yeah, these guys.

    And now they're turning around and saying "Don't use that open source BIND because it's crap. We should know, we wrote it!"

    Even more beautifully, try digging the version numbers from their nameservers:

    $ dig +short @ns1.nominum.net CH TXT version.bind.
    "Nominum ANS 3.0.1.0"
    $ dig +short @ns2.nominum.net CH TXT version.bind.
    "9.3.5-P2"
    $ dig +short @ns3.nominum.net CH TXT version.bind.
    "Nominum ANSPremier 4.1.0.0"

    One of the 3 nameservers for their own domain is running BIND, and a fairly old version of it at that!

    --
    Range Voting: preference intensity matters
  3. Re:Good Grief by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, I haven't seen a product that is as powerful as Bind9, paid or unpaid. The pain in the ass bit is simply the configuration, which when you start talking about various views based on ACLs, can get a bit eye-splitting (but then again, that applies to lots of things with ACLs, like Cisco IOS, Squid, etc).

    The guy is a liar. You know it. I know it. I think anybody who actually works with DNS infrastructure knows it.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.