DNS Community Day by DNS-OARC
OARC President, Phil Regnauld, recounts the key highlights, and pivotal discussions that transpired in the run-up to and during the inaugural DNS Community Day. The event left us inspired and informed about the future direction of our initiatives. Over to Phil…
On February 26th DNS-OARC held its first-ever DNS Community Day at the beginning of the APRICOT 2024¹ conference week in Bangkok, Thailand, just a fortnight after OARC 42 — the latest edition of our biannual conference.
Already before my formal start as OARC’s President in January, I’d been thinking of ways in which OARC could increase its geographical scope, reaching out to other regions where we had fewer members.
When APNOG kindly offered us a room at APRICOT to hold the event, we decided it was the perfect occasion to jump start our expansion process. We now had a venue and a date, but we yet had to figure out what the content, and format, should be.
Should we reuse materials from our recent OARC meeting? Few, if any, speakers would be present at APRICOT. And we preferred avoiding remote presentations. It then occurred to us that we didn’t need to follow the strict format of our other workshops. As my colleague Denesh Bhabuta, who chaired the meeting, put it:
“It’s a Community day, and we want participants from the region who feel they have something to share, to come forward. There should be some structure, but room for improvisation, last-minute talks, and free-form discussion. An in-real-life version of our Mattermost based chat server.”
The schedule for the day, along with access to all presentation slides is in the link:
We did want to have some presentations to anchor the day and solicited contributions from regional participants who had indicated their interest in attending the event. In addition, DomainTools was generous in allowing Eric Ziegast to travel to APRICOT and attend the DNS Community Day ahead of the main conference.
We’d worked with the APRICOT secretariat and THNIC to identify APRICOT attendees and others who might be interested in coming to the DNS Community Day, and reached out to everyone individually, as we had limited seating. On the event day, we had 47 participants throughout the day sitting around 4 large roundtables – a choice we’d made to facilitate interaction and encourage people to face each other. We had expected 30 participants!
After doing a short introduction on DNS-OARC to the room, and the reasons for arranging this event, Eric gave the first talk of the day, covering all things DNS with “Who do I trust? Everything in DNS used to be simple!”
This attracted a good number of questions and comments from the audience, including interesting historical reflections from Geoff Huston of APNIC and Barry Greene from the Shadowserver Foundation.
We followed up with the audience introducing themselves to other people on their own tables. We knew this would lower the barrier for attendees to get to know each other and engage during, and after, the event, and especially during the coffee break which was about to commence.
While we originally had envisioned 2 or 3-panel talks on topics such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) or DNSSEC deployment, they didn’t materialize, as we already had many questions and comments in response to the talks and presentations.
We followed the first coffee break with a presentation from Kazuhiro Kitamura from JPRS on M-root server deployment. This invited comments from the room on the usefulness of initiatives such as Hyperlocal root zone deployment.
Swapneel Patnekar of Shreshta then gave a talk on “Open Resolvers, and why do they still exist?”. You can read Swapneel’s coverage of the day here.
Immediately after lunch, as a follow up to delegates introducing themselves to other people on their tables, the audience in the room were encouraged, if they felt confident enough, to state their name and job title, and why they were attending this event.
We headed in to another scheduled talk. Anupam Agrawal of the India Internet Foundation (IIFON) had some interesting statistics on the resilience of root DNS server deployments in India which led on to a discussion in the room on the optimum number required within a country.
Then it was on to the beginning of some unscheduled ad-hoc talks, starting with one by Swapneel: “Who is living off your domain name”, on so-called Domain Shadowing Attacks.
Pensri Arunwatanamongkol, Executive Director at THNIC Foundation, presented some statistics on DNSSEC deployment in Thailand, showing some solid progress, and illustrating how the country was leading in the region when it came to DNSSEC signing.
It was then my turn to speak again, and I used the occasion to present a short overview of the software tools and services that are maintained by DNS-OARC, including DNSViz, CheckMyDNS, and other tools and utilities.
The last session of the day saw several ad-hoc presentations: Barry Greene explained the lessons we all could learn from the DDoS suppression community.
Geoff Huston gave an updated version of his talk on the increasing centralization of the DNS, which prompted some interesting comments on the effect this was having on the security and resiliency of the DNS.
Before we wrapped up the day, I pulled up a talk by Gaurab Upadhaya at APRICOT 2010, on DNS resiliency in the face of natural disasters, in this particular case, the 2010 Haiti Earthquake – but more importantly, on the importance of a good personal network and the role of the DNS community in ensuring continuity in the face of disaster – more than relevant 14 years later.
It was a fantastic first DNS Community Day, and I look forward to organizing another one somewhere else in the world soon. The enthusiasm and positive feedback we received show the importance of DNS-OARC’s mission in making the DNS more resilient, reliable, and transparent.
I’d like to thank APNOG/APRICOT and THNIC for helping us with this event, and all our speakers and participants that day for their contributions and great talks. And of course, thanks to my colleagues Denesh Bhabuta and Steve Sullivan of DNS-OARC for their hard work tracking down participants, finding speakers, and generally making this event a success.
See you at the next one!
-Phil
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Mattermost Chat Server: https://chat.dns-oarc.net[1] The APRICOT 2024 conference and workshop, took place in Bangkok, Thailand in late February. APRICOT, the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies, is by far the largest Internet conference in the region. The event attracts a large contingent of the most experienced Internet engineers, operators, researchers, policy groups, and plain users. It’s not unusual for more than 50 countries to be represented, and this edition saw the number of registered attendees exceed 1000, a record!
