This week I attended a two day long session on DNS and BIND hosted by Internet Systems Consortium with Alan Clegg as the instructor. Coming from a background of Active Directory-Integrated DNS, this was a wonderful opportunity to have hands on exposure to BIND.

The class started with topics that covered RFC 799 (1981) and RFC 822/833 (1983), DNS namespace, name resolution, caching, recursion, iteration, and stub resolvers. A major focus of the class was on BIND, which included history, configuration, and hands-on lab time to setup and troubleshoot common BIND issues.

A major benefit of being in the ISC office was the ability to talk to people that operate the F-Root servers. We have the opportunity to engineers about their software life-cycle, patching procedures, common support issues, and thread mitigation techniques.