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Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

businessinsider.com

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Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#141

Post by psyclobe »

rmdoss wrote: post #20

More people should be running their own mail servers, their own web servers, their own IRC servers, etc. But I don't think we are ever going back to that direction. The arguments and benefits for running one locally are not enough the trouble as well. Performance? Due to DNS caching at the resolver level, it is probably faster to use Google's 8.8.8.8 or CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1, than anything local (where all dns request…

I run my own dns server with a forward rule to a local cloudflared dns proxy. ISP's can't see my queries.

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#142

Post by rannug »

bo1024 wrote: post #139
rannug wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love a de-centralized web, but it is pretty hard to go back. As the powers that be continue to centralize and exert control in a negative way, I have a feeling the pendulum will swing the other way once people get annoyed with it. Kids are already using VPNs to circumvent controls. Need to make a cyberpunk-esque decentralization kit for the next generation to adopt.

That would be really cool! I feel like one of the surprisingly-big barriers is just the difficulty of geting a static IP address assigned to your home. If you could do that, then (I think) they could run everything from a Raspberry Pi: their own website, hosting their own email, etc etc. (It's actually not much harder technically to set this all up on a VPS, but then the kid has to put a monthly fee on a card -- prob…

I don't have a static IP at home. It changes every few weeks. I have a hack where a cron job uploads my home IP to a cloud server so I can know what it is when the IP changes.

Maybe a Distributed Hash Table DNS interface is in order? I think it could work if you cache your peers, and reach out to let them know your current state. Even during the Venezuela blackouts, not all IPs went dark.

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#143

Post by acct1771 »

songzme wrote: post #78

I have my own home server on a standard consumer Comcast internet (cheap plan at 60mbps) running c0d3.com, and the students that are learning how to code on it never had any issues with stability (except that one time where I had a power outage at home). I also have my router configured to use our server as a DNS server and the speed is incredible. Since I'm hosting my sites at home, when people in my WiFi network us…

If you're serving your website from your router as a webserver (dumb), this would be a concern. Serve your website(s) from a webserver running in a VM/container, and you're doing okay.

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#144

Post by HQS »

I think we are approaching another tipping point towards decentralization. As more and more people become aware of the privacy and other abuses from Google and Facebook there will be a growing migration towards anyone who offers alternatives and more choices.

I remember the great excitement of those early days when the internet first started to become a mass public phenonema. It was going to change everything, become the great leveler. Those huge entrenched monopolistic corporations would have trouble competing against small quick startups. And for a while that happened, entire industries were changed by tiny startups in garages, like Google. But as it became bigger Google changed for the worse.

I think this is going to be a continuing cycle. But one great thing is that we will be creating new tools such as blockchain and will have a clearer roadmap of what to do when somebody amasses so much centralized power that they start to limit our choices, to enrich themselves.

Another thing, today people are walking around with enough combined computing power in the phones in their pocket to dwarf the resources of even Google, Facebook, and even the CIA and NSA and I know we have enough hackers that would consider it a challenge and even fun to organize all that power to counteract any serious abuses.

For instance many phones these days have at least 8 processors around 4GHZ and it now is possible to add a 1 Terabyte SD Card. That is more than enough to use it as a DNS Server.

Soon we will be seeing more and more peer to peer mesh networks, decreasing the need to use an ISP. I think more and more local Co-ops will be formed with people networking together their computer resources. And these Co-ops could network together themselves. For example they could form an online buyers club with all purchases going through a specific IP Address and no transaction being able to be traced to individuals. And a small percentage of the purchase price can be earmarked to pay people running the DNS or other services or pay them for any useful specialized software they have developed for these uses.

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#145

Post by TabbedFonzo »

7ewis wrote: post #126
hazeii wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single data point, but I've been running a home DNS server (bind) for many years; it's set to be authoritative for the .local domain and caching for everything else (except for major tracking and advertising sites, which it blackholes). For hits that are in the cache (the usual case) it's obviously faster than going out to the 'net,. The black-holing combined with ad-blockers mean browsing is a lot faster and conside…

Did you change DNS using the BT Hub? Mine forces me to use their DNS, would love to turn it off at a router level. I know I can buy a new router but I can't justify that right now.

The work around for this (unfortunately) is to use another device to dish out DHCP. I have setup my Pi Hole to serve this and my DNS

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#146

Post by hazeii »

kosinus wrote: post #100
hazeii wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single data point, but I've been running a home DNS server (bind) for many years; it's set to be authoritative for the .local domain and caching for everything else (except for major tracking and advertising sites, which it blackholes). For hits that are in the cache (the usual case) it's obviously faster than going out to the 'net,. The black-holing combined with ad-blockers mean browsing is a lot faster and conside…

The .local TLD is reserved for mDNS. You may run into devices that completely refuse to resolve hosts in it using regular DNS.

Indeed, 'zero-configuration' only applies to users.

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#147

Post by hazeii »

_puk wrote: post #119
hazeii wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened is going online resulted in everything being redirected to a BT page saying you're not using our DNS and to change settings so you do. Some googling revealed a few people who'd had the same issue and found the (obscure) page that allowed you to undo the block. I assume they detected it simply by seeing DNS queries going to non-BT servers. Note this was a few years ago when it was pretty common for PC ma…

"N.B. I also recall BT redirecting requests for non-existent domains to some partner of theirs, I assume experimentally as I haven't seen or heard of that for a while" They are still doing this. I ran into it just yesterday. They do however make it very easy (click a couple of links) to turn it off.

Still, interception of communications is a serious crime (unless your monopoly-scale ISP does it, of course).

Thanks for the update (if somewhat depressing to know they still get away with it).

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#148

Post by johnny22 »

bo1024 wrote: post #139
rannug wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love a de-centralized web, but it is pretty hard to go back. As the powers that be continue to centralize and exert control in a negative way, I have a feeling the pendulum will swing the other way once people get annoyed with it. Kids are already using VPNs to circumvent controls. Need to make a cyberpunk-esque decentralization kit for the next generation to adopt.

That would be really cool! I feel like one of the surprisingly-big barriers is just the difficulty of geting a static IP address assigned to your home. If you could do that, then (I think) they could run everything from a Raspberry Pi: their own website, hosting their own email, etc etc. (It's actually not much harder technically to set this all up on a VPS, but then the kid has to put a monthly fee on a card -- prob…

If you don't have distributed backups handled, then you're just putting most users in a worse situation. Now they can lose important parts of their digital life in one disk crash.

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#149

Post by johnny22 »

jasonhansel wrote: post #31
rmdoss wrote: post #20

More people should be running their own mail servers, their own web servers, their own IRC servers, etc. But I don't think we are ever going back to that direction. The arguments and benefits for running one locally are not enough the trouble as well. Performance? Due to DNS caching at the resolver level, it is probably faster to use Google's 8.8.8.8 or CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1, than anything local (where all dns request…

I'd really like it if there was an easy way for "ordinary" consumers to setup a web/email/etc. server on, say, an AWS or GCP instance. Wouldn't exactly be decentralized, but it'd give users more control.

It must handle backups and restores too, otherwise you're just making it too easy for folks to lose all their data.

Re: Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers

#150

Post by icedchai »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #107
icedchai wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Performance of Google / Cloudflare DNS will be better simply because so many other people are using them: any common DNS query result will probably already be cached... FYI I run my own DNS server anyway.

But what is common for you will usually be cached already in your own server as well, so most requests will still be cache hits--and all those hits avoid the ~ 20 to 100 ms round trip to the internet. Take news.ycombinator.com, for example: The A record has a TTL of 300 seconds. So, after the first visit, which probably will take a bit longer than asking Google/CF, for every request in the next five minutes, you will…

True, true. I did not realize BIND had prefetch now. My internal nameserver was running an older bind (from Debian jessie?) I just upgraded to 9.10...
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