A recent blog post on APNIC describes GRoot, a tool that checks various DNS configuration and zone files for errors. Would be very useful if you need to maintain DNS servers.

circleid published an interesting article written by Geoff Huston on Scaling the Root of the DNS.

The IETF published RFC8932 which provides privacy recommendations for DNS operators. If you reach French, you can also read an excellent summary of this RFC by Stéphane Bortzmeyer.

If you use Chromium, you probably like its auto-suggestion feature. When you type the first characters of a domain name in the address bar, this browsers tries to consider this as either a search term or a domain name. To verify whether the letters that you typed are a valid domain name, it simply queries the DNS. Unfortunately, these queries are responsible for 50% of the load of the root DNS servers according to a post on the APNIC blog.

The HTTP Working Group of the IETF is currently revising the HTTP caching specification. Caches are a key element of the HTTP protocol. While working on this revising, Mark Notthigham has developed a nice visualisation that indicates how different browsers support this IETF draft. These visualizations are linked from the IETF draft itself !

*This blog post was written to inform the readers of Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice about the evolution of the field. You can subscribe to the Atom feed for this blog.