★★★★★ 5
Well Presented Concepts and Implementations (5th ed.)
Format: Paperback
Foreword: I have been running my own DNS servers on OpenBSD and FreeBSD for about 4 years. All of my previous DNS knowledge was obtained from the man pages and online tutorials.
The book is great because the example network used throughout the book is built upon, showing you how to "grow" your DNS with your expanding network. The design and implementation presented is priceless and covers some of my favorite topics: placement of slaves, hidden primaries, building root servers, split views, daisy-chaining, forwarders, partial-slaves, address maintenance issues, etc. The pros and cons of each setup are weighed and best practices are suggested. If you like a generous helping of diagrams, examples, and tables as a learning aid, you won't be disappointed.
One specific example of weighing the pros and the cons is presented on page 479 as follows:
"Could we have saved a few bucks on hardware by using our external authoritative nameservers as forwarders, too? Sure, but that would have presented a risk." After that statement, they proceed into all the details of "why."
There is adequate coverage on security. The authors preach defense in depth. An implementation example includes hiding your masters and only exposing bastion slaves. Securing communications between the masters and slaves is also covered in the security chapter using DNSSEC and TSIG. I think IPSec is another way to add a security layer, but that is probably another book.
After reading the book, I started to implement my new DNS infrastructure and found myself referring to the index often. It is fairly consummate, however, I found a few things missing, such as the $GENERATE statement. Also, some of the configuration details were lacking slightly. For example, the order in which ACL elements are processed and how negated elements affect the processing outcome. Another question I had was, what would happen if an ACL name is negated, and what if that ACL contained some negated elements. Well I found my answer by actually trying it and verifying with the canonical reference docs on isc.org.
I gave this book five stars because of its effectiveness in presenting the concepts and implementations of DNS using examples, good writing style, tables, and diagrams. If you're looking for the last 4 percent of the diminutive details of DNS, you will find it on isc.org.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2006
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