I’m happy to tell you that to date, we have had more than 350,000 visits to this blog. While I cannot thank enough all my frequent readers and customers who have made this possible, we’d also like to think that at least a part of our attraction stems from the fact that we actually have something new to offer to the exciting world of DNS, DHCP and IP address management. And to virtualization, of course, which is one cool technology. For further details, check out our revised solutions page at nixusoftware.com.

But let’s get back to the point.

To celebrate the 12th month of our Web Journal’s existence (I posted the first entry “On DNS Security” here on September 26 last year), I decided that we’ll make September 2007 a month of fun and games. Namely, during the next four (4) weeks, I will arrange four draws in which the happy winner will receive a $100 (one-hundred-US-dollars) Gift Certificate to Amazon.com. It costs nothing to participate. Here are the rules:

1. Go to Products page at www.nixusoftware.com
2. Find a link to free Nixu Product evaluation and click it
3. Submit an evaluation request for the Nixu Product of your choice (or evaluate them all if you like)
4. Download the ISO image of a Nixu Product by following the instructions in an email sent to you

By finding the link, submitting your REAL contact information (we cannot send you a Gift Certificate if we do not know who you are) AND by downloading the ISO image of a Nixu Product, you will automatically be entered into one or more draws in which you can win a $100 Gift Certificate to Amazon.com. Please note that as soon as you have completed these three simple steps (found the link, submitted info, and successfully downloaded the ISO image), you will be eligible for every remaining draw between that point in time and September 28. There will be one draw on each Friday of September 2007 (starting from September 7) so the sooner you participate, the more draws you’ll be eligible for and the better chances you have of winning. No entries will be accepted after 11am GMT on September 28 2007, and any one person will be entered only once regardless of how many product evaluations he/she generates.

Please rest assured that we do not make your contact details available to anyone outside Nixu Software, nor do we start pestering you in any way. I’ll personally send you a short follow up email with contact details to our helpdesk and sales as well as brief instructions to support your evaluation. That’ll be it unless you initiate a further dialogue with us.

The first name and the country of residence of the happy winner will be posted here every Friday starting from September 7 through to September 28. The Gift Certificate will be sent by email to the winner within 5 business days after the winner has been announced in this blog. To participate, you have to be 18 years of age or older and accept that apart from sending the Gift Certificate to the winners, Nixu Software will assume no other responsibilities whether expressed or implied. Staff of Nixu Software or Nixu Group or their relatives will not be eligible. Did I forget anything?!

The game is on. Hope you will find Nixu Products to your liking!

Having rambled on DNS virtualization quite a bit here, I thought I’d better search the web in an effort to find out whether we’re alone with this or if someone else was talking about DNS virtualization too. As it turned out, there’s at least one independent survey published in July 2007 by Mazarov Research & Consulting that touches base on DNS virtualization along with other DNS related topics. To read the survey, please click here (DNS Virtualization is covered on page 6).

While I find it intriguing that 10% of respondents have already virtualized some or all of their DNS servers, I’m fairly sure most of these installations have been made by early-adopters ahead of the virtualization curve. To allow everyone to reap the benefits and make running DNS servers as easy as virtually possible, I’ve prepared you a simple mini HowTo on creating secure, virtualized DNS servers:

1. Take a clean x86 box
2. Install VMware Server on it
3. Download Nixu SNS ISO Image and use it to boot a new virtual machine

You’re done now. But while you’re at it, you might also like to consider installing a virtualized DHCP server on the same box as a new vm.

Quite intriguing, no?

As some of you may already know, ISC announced last week that BIND 8 enters into end of life. As there are still most likely hundreds of thousands of BIND 8 installations out there, please upgrade your DNS servers to BIND 9. As Paul Vixie put it:

“Whereas BIND9 is now 8 years old, and BIND9 is performance-competitive against BIND8, and BIND9 conforms to more of the DNS protocol than BIND8, and BIND9 is more secure and more portable than BIND8, we are declaring BIND8 to be in “end of life” (like BIND4).

if you are running BIND8 (or BIND4), you should upgrade to BIND9.
if you are mirroring BIND8 (ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind), please stop.
(if you aren’t mirroring BIND9 (ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9), you could.)

the current version of BIND9 as of this moment is 9.4.1-P1.
it can be retrieved from <ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9/9.4.1-P1/>.
its release notes are at <http://www.isc.org/sw/bind/view?release=9.4.1-P1>.”

To make the upgrade as easy as possible, you might like to give Nixu SNS a go. Distributed as an ISO image that auto-installs the entire software stack from hardened Linux OS to the application layer in minutes (BIND 9 is included in the stack), you can use your existing x86 machines or virtual machines such as VMware Virtual Machine environment as the platform for your Nixu SNS installation.

Or even better, you could install the free VMware Server on your existing x86 hardware and boot Nixu SNS in one vm, and Nixu DHCP Server in another. And maybe have two servers set up like this to provide for full DNS redundancy and DHCP failover.

Just an idea.

I’m happy to tell you that we just launched a new software appliance, Nixu DHCP Server. With this addition to Nixu Software’s product family, we are now in a position to offer affordable end-to-end D-service solutions for practically all DNS and IP addressing needs. For further details, please see the related announcement at www.nixusoftware.com.

While developing Nixu DHCP Server, our aim has been to create a DHCP product that is secure by design and easy to install. Further, we’ve tried to make the WebUI as intuitive as possible and include useful value-adding features such as automated DHCP configuration validations and automated software updates in it. The idea here is to make admins’ life as easy as possible as well as to enable high level of flexibility when planning the network architecture: with our unique software appliance approach, it’s very easy to add and to remove servers as the network and the related requirements evolve (especially as Nixu DHCP Server is sold as annual subscriptions at $495 / server /year including maintenance & support).

But enough of advertising. If you’d like to give our new product a go, you can download it by submitting an evaluation request behind this link.

First, I must admit that I have always been a little sceptic on whether or not DNSSEC will ever go mainstream. There are so many complexities associated with the standardization process and the rollout that the pragmatic in me would rather just forget about the whole thing and revisit the topic in a few years’ time. Yet on the other hand, if everyone viewed things the same way, our industry would start stagnating. So we decided to throw our scepticism out of the window and give DNSSEC a chance.

One of the problems with DNSSEC is that although there are several DNS server implementations that do support DNSSEC standards, e.g. BIND 9.4 series, the support has not been extended to the commercial tools and solutions used for DNS and IP address management. This is a bit of a problem for many who would like to experiment with DNSSEC, as key management and zone signing can become quite a pain if you have a lot of zones to manage but no proper tools for the job. In fact, if you are a service provider with thousands of zones, manual key management and zone signing might actually constitute a full-day job for one of your engineers. That’s no good for DNSSEC adoptation, as it spells E-X-P-E-N-S-I-V-E.

This being the case and considering the fact that we have hundreds of service provider customers around the world running Nixu NameSurfer Suite – the DNS and IP address management solution – we decided to make a small survey in late 2006 and ask them if anyone was expecting to experiment with DNSSEC in the near future. As it turned out, there were some who were not only expecting to look into this, but actually were planning to introduce DNSSEC support in their production networks as early as 2008. And so to facilitate a clear RFE (Request for Enhancement) originating from customers, we decided to develop our first implementation of DNSSEC support and include it in the new Nixu NameSurfer Suite 6 Series announced publicly last week.

While we still do not know if or when DNSSEC will go mainstream, Nixu Software will now be ready should things start happening on this front. But even more importantly, as we always say that listening our customers is at the core of everything Nixu Software does, we wanted to manifest this by putting our money where our mouth is.