Slashdot Mirror
Nominum Calls Open Source DNS "a Recipe For 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."
I hope he doesn't run any Linux distributions in his company, at all. That would make him a hypocrite.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Linux seems to be fine for them to run their web server.
sig: sauer
Yeah, because the poster child of closed source - Windows - is *so* secure...
I resent that, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Windows is the most secure system in the entire world as long as you leave the system unplugged from the network and inside of a Faraday cage. With the USB ports disabled and no CD-ROM/Floppy drive. And armed guards at the door.
It's a feasible option for any business.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
I'll sum up their argument: We use security through obscurity, and that makes us better. You should pay us for that. Also, when we say "cloud-based," we really just mean "in our data centers." They're really abusing the definition of cloud computing, just because it's the current profit-generating buzzword.
SIG: HUP
I resent that, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Windows is the most secure system in the entire world as long as you leave the system unplugged from the network and inside of a Faraday cage. With the USB ports disabled and no CD-ROM/Floppy drive. And armed guards at the door. It's a feasible option for any business.
Until you turn it on...
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I resent that, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Windows is the most secure system in the entire world as long as you leave the system unplugged from the network and inside of a Faraday cage. With the USB ports disabled and no CD-ROM/Floppy drive. And armed guards at the door.
It's a feasible option for any business.
Until you turn it on...
I NEVER TOLD YOU TO DO THAT! YOU'VE DOOMED US ALL!
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
I don't know about you, but any company that feels the only way they can sell their product is to basically slander their competitors isn't likely to get my attention. As it is, and as much of a pain in the ass as Bind can be, I have yet to encounter anything quite as powerful as Bind9. It's certainly not without flaws, but after having had to deal with the inadequacies of Microsoft's DNS, anyone who comes up to me and says "Oh yeah, those open source DNS servers are the lesser products" is either a liar or a moron.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... how can you trust these guys to write your DNS software? They're the very guys who were contracted to write Bind9, the foremost open source domain name server, which they're now complaining about.
And, from TFA:
Reconcile THAT little gem with support for closed source software.
...proprietary software company says you should buy their product instead of using something else.
I'm shocked, I tell you. Just shocked.
"But it is opening up these customers to problems." Nice, textbook FUD/propaganda. Put the thought out there. Deflect attention from your own failings. Lump all 'freeware' DNS into the same basket. Call it 'freeware' instead of Open Source to link it to badly written DOS/Windows programs. Wow, this company is sleazy. It would be such poetic justice for some grey hat hackers to take these goons down.
Open source DNS is tried and true, everyone uses it. No one was ever fired for installing BIND. This new flash in the pan company has been hacked before, how long until they are hacked again? Why trust your DNS to some untested startup using inappropriate buzzwords like 'cloud computing?' Why pay for what you can get for free? Why outsource your DNS to someone who may or may not be here tomorrow? Heh. We can play at the FUD game, too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A company has just promoted their own policies and products while at the same time demoting those of their competitors. People are in a state of shock, children are crying, students are demonstrating and the president is making an announcement later this evening. The UN has named this day the annual PR stunt day.
I am the lawn!
90% of everything (you read) is horsepucky.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
I have some familiarity with SRD/IPRD and I have to say that I'm not very impressed with Nominum.
Single-user root admin in our deployment and a hideous java/windows front end for end-users... One which is so crappy we don't deploy.
Their training is USAstyle puppy mill powerpoint demos running on virtual machines.
Couple that with the fact that they were subject to the same DNS exploits as some of the "vendors" they are trashing in the article and I just think...
Man, what a bunch of ass hats spinning market droid fluff. Somehow, I'm not surprised.
(The views expressed in this post are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.)
You really do need to look under the hood and kick the tyres. Maybe it's a Ferrari on the outside, but it could be an Austin Maxi on the inside.
He contradicts himself, he tells you to kick the tyres and look under the hood, and then touts his product which he explicitly states won't let you look under the hood...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I think its interesting that they are using the term freeware instead of open source or FOSS. In a lot of people's minds freeware is shit like bonzai buddy or comet cursor or whatever spyware-laden free software these execs always manager to get on their computers. They equate FOSS with badly written spyware and they keep using the term freeware in their quotes. Interesting. They must have Frank Lutz working for them.
Im sure a lot of execs find this message believable and are drafting up a 'no freeware' policy to only be diplomatically corrected by the IT dept later on.
Ironically, I have a hard time trusting non-FOSS freeware. I always wonder if Im getting a virus or a trojan and wondering why I havent been able to find an OSS alternative to closed source windows freeware/nagware programs. Paid for proprietary Im less worried about, but Im not paying for what I consider basic functionality like DNS.
The summary says " Nominum was one of the companies affected by the DNS cache poisoning problem of last year".
But in the interview, I just read this:
See? The summary can't be right.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Powerdns was vulnerable to the Kaminsky attack, but in a different way. It was actually easier to spoof the server due to its more actively dropping certain DNS packets. So while it did perform source port randomization, it was not totally immune to the attack either.
http://doc.powerdns.com/security-policy.html itself states:
All versions of PowerDNS before 2.9.21.1 do not respond to certain queries. This in itself is not a problem, but since the discovery by Dan Kaminsky of a new spoofing technique, this silence for queries PowerDNS considers invalid, within a valid domain, allows attackers more chances to feed *other* resolvers bad data.
Though it is phrased as "someone elses problem", in the DNS word of course nothing is "someone elses problem". DNS servers are chained in hierachies and one problem somewhere leads to problems elsewhere. DNS is all about protocol compliance to ensure interoperability. With the "someone elses problem" approach, we would have had no "reflection attack" and "amplification attack" problems either, it being "someone elses problem". Despite the nice phrasing, powerdns caused cache poisoning problems as a result of the Kaminsky attack that needed to be addressed.
In general, I have a problem with bug reports and changelogs writing things as "improved error handling", "made more robust" or "add security to" which are too often used to hide the real security impact of certain bugs. DJB's policy of "it is not my bug to fix, because it is an operating system bug" is also completely bogus from a system administrator point of view who still ends up with a security problem.
1970 called: they want their "Security Thru Obscurity" argument back.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Personally I never use any computer with a monitor output just in case there's a TEMPEST rig nearby..
Have you ever even used Bind9? Yes, it's got a few hangovers from the olden days, but it is was damned powerful piece of software. Bind9 views are pretty much the most powerful networking server software component I've ever used. When I was the network admin for a small ISP, we had three separate WiFi networks that, because of the idiosyncrasies of the proprietary technology, each needed customized zones, as well as a Server 2000 AD network, and I was able to run all of them on a single set of Bind9 servers, as well as our public DNS servers for the domains we hosted. It took a bit of work to get it there (though not that much, like anything, it's more just getting used to the nomenclature).
As I recall, you can even plug an RDBMS like MySQL into it if that's how you want to manage your zones, though to be honest, I never much saw the point.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I have the same problem with using local butchers. They buy their meat on the open market, and it is possible to track that meat down to the farm where the cow came from. Those cows are kept outdoors, where anyone can see them. Lord knows what toxins people might be injecting into those cows.
That's why I only eat meat from MeatCorp. All of MeatCorp's meat is made behind closed doors, in a giant, guarded metal building. Nobody knows what happens inside, and that makes me feel safe when I eat MeatCorp brand Meat Circles.
You must be talking of an older version of Bind. Bind9 can use a wide variety of database backends. It's also a complete rewrite.
Buy our service or the ManBearPig will catch you. We are more secure because you don't know how much insecure are us, but there was an specific case where the dns used by the vast majority of internet had a (fixed) vulnerability under special circunstances in certain moment.
We used to do commercial support for ISC products, but that didn't work out very well. The company's been reinvented a couple of times since then, and at this point all of our products are homegrown. But many of the original BIND 9 developers work at Nominum, and the author of the ISC DHCP server (me) works there too. That was then, this is now.
Yo Nominum, im really happy for you, and imma let you finish, but microsoft is one of the best trolls of all time!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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!"
We have heard that tired, old argument before, a few idiot CIOs will swallow it, happy to pay top dollar for something that the free s/ware does better. Let them, as long as Nominum sticks to the RFCs and doesn't fork the spec - we don't care.
First, it's an interview. A lot of interviews tend to be one-sided. Especially on non-controversial issues, but the interviewer is obviously not aware of any potential controversy.
Second, it would be a good idea to post a comment there, and mail the interviewer and CC the editor. Let them know that they have essentially printed an advertisement, and that some alternative viewpoint would be in order, or at least questioning the claims.
Third, and most important, ZDNet is not known for investigative journalism. They will thank you for your message and that's about it. So the only good you can really do here is leave a comment, maybe pointing back to this discussion to see what knowledgeable people in the field think about the interview.
Do not fume about it. Do not rage on a forum about it. Do not send you buddy and e-mail pointing out the stupidity of their comments. Make a press release containing the facts and release it.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
If you've ever had the pleasure of actually seeing a quote from Nominum, you'll see why they're so down on 'freeware'.
Nominum's DNS software is extremely (and I mean VERY) expensive. For anyone. And I don't just mean it's hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's HUNDREDS _OF_ THOUSANDS of dollars for even a few licenses.
I suspect sales are down (in these uncertain economic times *cough*) so slandering the competition (errrmmm... how do you compete with free?) is apparently the current marketing strategy.
Happily, this interview/article makes me dislike them and their products even more than I already did.
He's obviously saying that "Freeware" is the only way that malware can attack your system, so therefore he thinks that Windows is "Freeware"!
Maybe he lives in China?
And according to the article above this one on the /. front page, open source software has fewer bugs (and hence one would suppose it is more secure) than ever. This looks like a classic case of a for-profit company with little to offer their customers over their open-source competition, so they resort to FUD. Does "Linux is a cancer" ring a bell for anyone?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
dig nominum.com ns +short
ns3.nominum.com.
ns1.nominum.com.
ns2.nominum.net.
dig @ns2.nominum.net version.bind txt chaos +short
"9.3.5-P2"
Is it me, or does that not look like a bind version number (an old one, at that)
Nothing too serious, probably a prank from some bored employees at the time. We asked some of the Nominum people what they were up to, since we'd been receiving packets that caused PowerDNS to crash from Nominum IP space.
I seem to recall one of their (ex-)employees eventually even told us which bug they had been triggering.
I don't for a moment believe this was a Nominum-sanctioned activity.
But this is all way back in the mists of time, the beginning of 2002.
Bert
(PowerDNS)
Lando Calrissian approves.
Paranoia for hire.
While I disagree with the idea that open-source DNS servers are insecure (having written one myself), I can see why he wants to say bad things about Open-source DNS servers.
The bottom line is this: There is no money to be made with DNS. While DNS is something that is essential for the Internet, it's something that is completely free. Bert Hubert tried making money with DNS a few years ago with PowerDNS, but sales were so bad he threw in the towel and GPLd the code around 2002. BIND 9 was, as it turns out, funded with a combination of contributions from UNIX corporations and military funding (for DNSSEC) who wanted to update DNS, but the funding has dried up and the code is BSD-licensed. NSD and Unbound's development were funded with government grants.
DjbDNS was done as an independent project by Bernstein; he stopped working on it in 2001 and the code is really out of date (three unpatched security holes, outdated root servers list, etc). My own MaraDNS is still being actively developed, but at a glacial pace; between my girlfriend, my job, and my other interests, I often have to put it on the back burner.
So, yes, DNS is essential, but it's free and it's really hard to make money with it. Heck, it's hard to get enough goodwill and net-reputation from making a DNS server for me to get a well-paying job in the US working with computers again in today's depression-level tech economy (if you want to hire someone with the expertise to write a DNS server, my resume is online).
So, yeah, I can see why this person resorts to FUD and BS to try and get people to pay more money for DNS. But, the truth is that there are a lot of really good free and open-source DNS servers out there an no need to buy a commercial DNS server.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
security by obscurity = automatic EPIC FAIL.
I won't be using nominum services, even if there's a free version. That's a confession of incompetence.
Tech Public Policy stuff