and you're muted.
And yep. Oh, I thought we already had. Okay, I thought we already started the recording. My fault. Good evening, everybody. This is the St. Louis Linux user group, St. Louis log. This is Thursday, March the 19th, 2026. Third, there is day of the month.
It's our usual monthly log meeting, and tonight our speaker is Grant Taylor. He's going to speak to us on Dns. Who's on first? What's on second? With apologies to Abbott and Costello. It's part of our continuing grants, continuing talks on DNS.
So with our usual. Beginning of the meeting, we'll have a few announcements here. Uh, the Linux-focused presentations are the ones tonight, the LUG meeting, and uh… See, Stan, I see your mouth moving, but I don't know what you're saying.
and we still don't hear words, Dan. Oh, good. Okay.
Good. you know, could it would have burned everybody's ears.
Ah, okay. All right.
Particularly yours.
Go ahead. Go ahead. You seem to know what the hell you're doing. Go ahead.
Oh. The slides disappeared.
Why bother? You never follow any of them.
Well, it's trying.
Okay, looks like we're not going to have slides.
Oh, there?
It was a screen… you may have to flip to another screen.
Apparently. Don't blame me anyway. Okay. While we.
See what else we might be able to put together here quickly. I mean, our speaker, Grant, is here, but as far as opening questions and answers, anybody have any questions, comments that they want to make?
They use technetium, but like I said, it could be afterwards.
Okay.
There he is. Okay.
I'm sorry, Tyler. I didn't understand that.
The technetium DNS server anybody has anybody used it before?
Hi.
Yes. Hexisco guy. So, build a Cisco regional eggs.
Nope.
Good, bad. Good, bad…
Good, bad. Avoid it at all costs.
I think Tyler is asking if TechTM DNS server is worth messing with or if it's more avoidant. Is that correct, what you're asking, Tyler?
Yeah. Yep. Has anybody used it as a bit them in the back rear end?
I guess I should check to see if there's a…
Terraform module for it.
Nice.
Gary, go ahead.
Okay. Let's see other things going on this month. Normally last month was our annual vote due to some problems with the US mail. We have extended the voting for one more month.
So you have until the 1st. first Monday of next month, I guess first Monday of April when our steering committee meeting is, you can vote online or you can vote by US mail. Instructions are out there on the website.
Let's see what else do we have?
If you have attended 2 meetings in the year, you are eligible to vote.
That is correct. There's no membership dues, just if you are in the calendar year, if you were at any two of our meetings, you're eligible to vote.
and Grant and Lee are the incumbents on the seats that are up for election on our 5 member board of directors.
So… And let's see.
I can't remember any other specific announcements.
we have the multiple mailing lists. There's announce, which is low traffic, usually just upcoming events.
There's discuss. which is open for general discussion of any.
Unix-related topic, maybe even other. If you want. We have the assistant mailing list that is for.
people that help operate the slug. internal infrastructure that's not necessarily open to the world in case we accidentally publish something to the list that's a little sensitive.
But if you want to participate, reach out to any SLUB member and we can help get you connected to it.
There's a steer com list. that is discussions about the organization, suggestions, hey, I think you should do something different type thing.
Uh, though we do ask that you come with suggestions on what to do different and be willing to help.
Any other mailing lists, Gary, or does that cover it?
I think that covers it. The good list. Thank you.
Let's see. Oh, we don't yet have a speaker set up for the general meeting. The first or the second Wednesday of next month, but we'll have one soon. Stay tuned.
And. Let's see.
Seemed like there was something else I was going to mention. I can't think what it is now. It'll come to me.
So, um… Anybody have any other general questions?
It'll be tough.
Just wanted to mention that, uh… Next Tuesday, I think it is, the fourth Tuesday will be the, uh… The newcomers Lennox meeting.
Oh, thank you. Thank you.
I think just about everybody here is familiar with that group. You don't have to be.
new to Linux. It's just that whoever claims to be.
the newest person who's come to Linux gets to ask the questions until their questions are satisfied. But it's amazing for those of us who've been around Linux for a little bit longer. It's always a good meeting to go to, because.
Everybody has a different idea of how something can be done. Somehow I always learn something. I didn't realize was a way of doing it.
Okay. If there are no other announcements, I I know also Stan has a lot of information on the I believe it's called Rica. It's the radiation exposure Act.
There was a lot of radioactive contamination in the St. Louis area, particularly from.
The northern edge of downtown going all the way out through North County into St. Charles County. Um, so, uh, anybody who.
has types of cancer or other diseases that can be traced back to radiation exposure over the multiple decades. We talk all the way back to.
late 40s all the way through up until very recently.
Stan's got some information available online and he can help get you directed towards finding out how there can be some compensation, so… Check into that if you any of your family, any of your friends have a situation like that.
One of the other things that we normally mention is if you go to our website, there's a calendar on the front page.
Okay.
It lists SLUG-sponsored events. I'm in red, and it lists other events that we're aware of that people may be interested in. I think they're another color.
And kind of, if you're looking for more content.
take a gander at the calendar.
Thank you. That's an excellent point. Morning.
We're working from memory here. We're going to get a passing grade from Stanford.
Of course, he's made the PDF available, I just don't have it open right now.
Yeah.
Okay. I think we probably covered the major points. And.
Uh, anything else we'll think of afterward. Grant. Grant's been.
bringing us along the last few months with some good clues as to how DNS gets gets us from a domain name to the IP address that it wants to go to. So… With that, I think I'm going to hand it over to Grant and let him start tonight. Who's on first?
We're going deeper than that tonight.
Gonna get to 3rd base.
this is a family show. We're not talking about that.
Hmm. There it is.
is Zoom been remotely cooperating?
and you see my screen. All right.
Clearly, if you can make the text bigger, it might help a little bit.
Yeah, sure.
Keep going.
That helps.
It's… my amateur webmaster. It's throwing some things out. I can make the text bigger, but I have to make the window bigger, which is counterproductive to making the text bigger.
Well, I don't break it. That's fine. That's better than it was.
Okay, um, when we go into each one, we can probably Zoom a little bit more.
So as discussed. last month, I'm not sure which meeting it was on, because we're trying to rotate complies.
Oh, okay.
is we're doing ENS theme discussion series. And we kind of did a skit, which will have a reprise of shortly.
Um, but the idea is, what is DNS? What does it work? How does it work? Etc.
And we want audience engagement. We want to know your questions to make sure we can talk to them.
Hey, Grant, I'm going to interrupt for just a second. We've already had a question in the chat, and the question was, is the recording being shared? So yes, we will put the recording on the archive, and it will be available after this meeting.
And the slide deck is already available. I'm actually showing it off the server.
Excellent.
so. sound off if you have questions. And can somebody be a chat monitor that has a microphone and can sound off.
If there's a question or comment in the chat.
Alrighty.
Okay. So I just sat down, started thinking about what is Dns? What is a domain name? One question led to an answer which led to another question, and I just picked.
more than a handful, less than a bushel. And put them together as a question and an answer. And I am hoping that people will actually engage, ask for follow up, etc.
So without further ado. What is Dns?
Let me. Okay. Dns can actually stand for multiple different things, domain name, system, domain name, service, domain name server.
kind of pick your poison, and it's kind of somewhat context sensitive, but it's different things that have to do with publishing domain name information.
DNS itself is a bunch of interconnected servers that work in concert with each other. We'll kind of get into here in a little bit.
It is a massively distributed database. that is eventually consistent.
And different people are responsible for different parts.
Any questions?
Hmm.
So it's made up of different parts. Each part is different, and they're all pulled together into one, or they each have… is there a separate copy, or… identical copies in various places.
Good question, and they are separate pieces that point to each other, and like the root will point to org. Org will point to slug and Slug can answer www.
And we'll get more into that. So each little piece is responsible for a small subset, but it is very well defined how to interact and find the other pieces.
So if one piece breaks, what happens?
Depends what that piece is. If it is slugs, Dns server.
the sysadmins are having a bad day, and mail queues up on sending.
people subscribe to the mailing list sending servers, and gets delivered when.
All right.
we get it fixed. If google.com has a DNS issue, it's a whole lot bigger issue. Or if Amazon has a DNS issue, about half the internet stops for.
bad reasons. Mm-hmm. Great questions. Thank you.
Okay, thanks.
So if Dns is meant to publish domain names. What's a domain name?
and a domain is really a collection of things.
It can be a collection of systems, what have you.
It references the organization. So SLUG as an organization has the domain name slug.org.
I have a personal one. Lee has his personal one. Google has theirs, Google.com.
It's just a name for a collection of things.
Dns uses what are called fully qualified domain names.
And what is a fully qualified domain name? Www.slug.org.
is a fully qualified domain name, or Bach.sloo.org is a fully qualified domain name.
Um… What do I have here? Fully qualified domain name is a domain that includes all the components.
Versus domain, a name that does not include components all.
That gets into the next question, but… Anything else before I go to the next slide? Any questions?
Okay. What type of domain names don't include all of the components? And that's an unqualified domain name. I referred to Bach.slook.org. When we're talking internally, we say Bach.
Or we say, or I say my test lab at home. I know what it is in the context of the discussion.
But it is unqualified, so the world doesn't know what it is, kind of comparing and contrasting between the fully qualified a moment ago and unqualified now.
Do those make sense? Gary, I'm looking at you.
Sure.
Gary.slug.org. That's where all those 20 gig of mail. He's never written.
Hey, I have evidence. He read some email. It was an accident. It won't happen again.
Uh, we have removed gary.sloob.org from DNS. Hmm.
Hey, it's it's all on those clay tablets, and then.
So what types of Dns software is there? There's really only two pieces, a client, somebody that asks questions, and a server.
something that answers questions. That's as simple as it gets.
And it's a model you see all over the internet.
Um, what roles do the different types of software have?
The client, that's what's in your web browser that opens the Slug website.
Or it… Zoom is a client software that said, hey, where is this weird funky Zoom address to log in to get to the meeting?
The next critical piece is what's called a recursive server. It's what your client uses, and it is also what goes out and gets answers from or for you.
The third piece is an authoritative server. Bach unqualified name is the authoritative server for slug.org Dns.
It will answer questions for slug.org. It will not answer questions for google.com.
You have to go to Google's authoritative server to say, where is www.google.com?
So authoritative servers are busy answering requests for things they are responsible for.
They won't do other things. It's the recursive server's job to find the proper authoritative server to get the information that's needed.
We'll go more into that in a minute, but are there any questions before I move on?
I was curious about, uh… I hear resolver used a lot. Are they referring to the client or the server when they say resolver?
Mm-hmm.
That is a very good question, and it is probably context dependent. It… could refer to the client that is asking, like there is a resolver stub library inside of.
my web browser that asks the computer, Hey. Where is this address?
And it's really just a library call and then computer or the operating system operating system says, I don't know, let me go ask the recursive server for you.
Or it could be a reference to the recursive server which resolves and gives you an address.
Do you have a example of context, and I might be able to tell you better?
No, I just, I just remember seeing a couple of things where they're talking about a resolver.
Yeah.
I'm trying to figure out, like you say, I guess context or whatever are they talking about? Is that a server, or is that a client?
So thank you.
It. Yep, I can't quite tell from that. It's kind of a 6040, and I don't know if it's 60 40 or 40, 60.
So what… Okay.
We have a question in chat from Paul. The question was, server URL question mark.
Ah. you are.
I think that's the context of that. I think he was curious about.
When you said that you were operating these slides off of the server.
I guess I… so that's why I put salute on there.
Oh. Gotcha. Uh, give me a minute… Where is the chat hiding?
Zoom. You are annoying.
Should be right next to participants on the bottom.
Yeah, it should be, but I'm sharing my screen, and it won't.
Oh, you got to find the toolbar. Uh, it might be under the three dots.
I'm looking at it.
on the right side of the toolbar.
Oh…
Anyway, the question was, he asked server URL question mark.
When you had mentioned you were pulling the slides off a server.
Yeah.
Let's try…
There. Can you see that URL to read it and copy it?
Well. Why don't you put that in chat?
I can't find the chat, or I would. It's what I was looking for.
Zoom sucks.
Chat's right down at the bottom.
No, it isn't.
Now, when you're sharing the screen.
is on mine.
You're not sharing the screen. Then it's not… then the chance at their insurance screen.
"No, I'm not.
Yeah, we've moved it behind the menu.
I think I. Bear with me a minute.
There you go. Try that. Take the number off the end of it.
There we go.
Okay. Did that answer the question?
They were. I think it probably does, but Mal, anytime you get a chance, you can tell us yes or no there in the chat, or you can turn your microphone if you have that ability.
Okay. So Zoom is an example of a client.
Your ISP or Open Dns. or Google. They offer recursive services to people.
Anybody that wants to publish a domain will need to utilize an authoritative server somewhere.
What is a DNS client? I kind of talked about that a moment ago. That is what is inside of your application. It is what says, what is the IP address of www.sloob.org.
It is your computer. It is the thing asking for information, asking the questions.
What is a DNS server? It is the thing that answers questions and provides information to clients.
Um, the type of server I've touched on a moment ago, there are a couple of different types, and we'll go into the differences here in a moment.
Comments, questions, concerns?
Um, what type of DNS servers? They're recursive and authoritative. We've touched on.
What is the difference between a recursive and authoritative server?
Recursive server receives the DNS query from your client and goes out and gets the information from authoritative servers on your behalf.
It will go out, and it will talk to a whole bunch of different servers to get what you want.
Conversely, an authoritative server only answers for the zones or domains that it is responsible for.
Authoritative servers do not answer other queries. Like, if you ask… Bach or Bach.sloop.org.
for fully qualified, wear www.google.com is. It will return an error message because it is an authoritative server, and it does not do recursive queries.
Yeah, okay. That was ah, okay.
What's that, Gary? Okay.
And that kind of gets… Before we go deeper.
Let's ruminate a moment, see if there are any other questions regarding the types of servers.
Okay. So… You'll hear the phrase or the word zone and the word domain.
When it comes to DNS, they're not quite the same thing. But they're kind of close, especially from the Internet.
Um, what's the difference between a zone and a domain? Little of this, some of that.
A zone is a collection of one or more domains grouped together under it for administrative purposes.
For the purposes of this discussion, they're approximately equal. We'll get into the minutiae of what the differences are in a bit. But for now.
a zone and a domain are approximately the same.
And then how to apparently I got some things out of order.
How does a recursive DNS server get answers for clients?
recursive DNS server goes out to successive authoritative servers.
to figure out, okay. What is this piece of information gets pointed over to another server, goes to that other server, gets another piece of information, and once it gets the answer, it goes back and it provides it to the client. That is the recursion process. It's a recursive loop of.
go ask a server, get a redirect, go ask the redirect server, get another redirect, go ask the redirect redirect server.
Prince Lather repeat until you get the answer or a hard error, and then exit the recursive loop.
Hearing nothing. I'm going on the lucky 13. And this is more… Let's do a rehash of last month's presentation. This is the page that talks about it and it outlines. And Zoom, why are you covering things I want to see with the pencil?
So I need some volunteers.
Lee, who do you want to be?
I'll do the first one, since my name is on it.
I don't know. I can't read it.
Okay.
Great! What's the IP address of www.sloo.org?
Well, hang on, let's I'll be the recursive. Lee, I think you were.
the one of the authoritatives. Gary, do you want to be the root, or do you want to be a top level?
Oh, let's see. I don't look good in green, so I can't be those leafy green things on the top levels. I guess I have to be the root. I kind of keep my head in the ground.
Okay. Fair enough buried under email.
Mm-hmm.
I need one more volunteer.
pick me. That was wrong.
Uh, who was that? Okay, thank you, Ron.
So. You should see your name next to line, and everybody that me has one line to read.
Phil, you are our client. Please read your lie.
Yeah. Okay. Grant.
The recursive. What is the IP address of www.slew.org?
So I get Phil's question, and I think to myself, I don't know that. Let me find out.
Uh, hey, Gary, as the root, what is the IP address of www.slug.org?
Grant recursive. You should ask Ron what the IP address of wwsloop.org is.
Okay, let me go ask Ron. I'll go deeper in this recursion loop. Hey, Ron, buddy, old pal. What's the IP address of www.sloop.org?
Grant, you should ask Lee what the IP address of slug.org is.
Boy, I seem to have to be going to a whole bunch of different servers. Lee, do you know what the address for www.sloop.org is?
Grant, the IP address of www.sloop.org is 206197251210.
Finally. Hey, Phil, sorry it took so long. The address for www.sloop.org finally got it for you. 206197-251-210.
Thank you.
You're welcome. Okay.
I have a bit of a question, Grant. Um, at some point, would… let me just… reconcile here names with positions.
Hang on.
Would I not answer with, uh… Ask Grant what the IP address of .org is.
And then it kind of works its way back from there.
Oh. Very good question, and contemporary.
Yes, you are correct. However, historically, that was not the case.
and I'll go more into that in a moment.
Historically. when recursive servers.
asked for information. From the various different servers during the process of recursion, they would ask the football question like www.slug.org.
I would ask that to everybody. That means that every server that I'm asking, when I ask Gary, when I ask Ron, when I ask Lee.
That actually means that they can know. What one of the clients that's asking me.
what they're actually looking for. I don't remember when it was, but for privacy and expediency reasons, there is something called query minimization, which.
In the back of my head, I was planning on talking about this with a different slide at some other meeting with a tweak of this that applied query minimization, as in maybe a checkbox. Do you want to minimize queries or not?
In that case, Phil would ask me, what is the address of www.sloop.org?
Because he's the client he's asking me as the recursive for the entire address.
But I would only ask Gary as the root.
What is? Where do I go for org? Gary would tell me org is over there. Go talk to Ron.
I would then ask Ron, hey, Ron, where should I go for slug.org? Ron would say, go talk to Lee.
Since Lee is authoritative for sloop.org, I would ask Lee, what is the address for www.sloop.org?
that is newer… I want to say the last 10 or 15 years. I don't remember when query minimization became a thing.
Yep, sure does. Thanks.
Does that answer your question? Okay, great question was planning on going there more later, not tonight, but you're ahead of the class.
Okay? Any other comments or questions about? This.
Not hearing any, so… I will go back to the slide deck. And this is just a rehash.
of some of what we just did. And copying and pasted the actual.
Phil asks Grant, Grant asks. Something important to note.
Phil is the DNS client. He only asked one question.
He asked the recursive server. Also important is each authoritative server and.
Gary was authoritative for the route. Ron was authoritative for .org.
Lee was authoritative for Slug.org, so they're all three authoritative, but authoritative for different pieces.
But they each point… in a hierarchy to provide a whole bunch of information.
Like org could say com is at Stan's place, and Stan could say, Google is at Steve's place.
So each one carries a little bit of load. They point to the next chain in the link.
all authoritatives respond for their information only. It's the recursive server that has to go and talk to all of the authoritatives, and spends more time and energy.
To get a simple answer to reply to the client.
Does that make sense?
Gary, are you going to be asked on recursion?
I'm sorry. Say again.
Maybe that one more time. It's the say that last sentence one more time. It is the authoritative that.
The authoritative servers only answer queries about the information they are responsible or authoritative.
4.
which is why they're called authoritative.
Yes, and it is the recursive server that goes out and talks to all the necessary authoritative servers recursively.
to get the ultimate answer to pass back to the client.
Okay.
Client asks one question. authoritative servers each answer one question.
recursive goes in a loop, goes crazy, talking to a whole bunch of other servers to get an answer to give to the client.
makes sense.
Yep.
Okay. So what is a domain?
It's a collection of various Dns records. Um, and they're separated at the dot boundary. So www.
And I know I referred to a domain earlier as an organization more accurately, the domain is the piece.
of text in between the dots. Don't talk to me about emojis or Unicode. They're another form of text between dots. They just display differently.
Every dot boundary separates a domain. Domain is a technical construct.
That last bit is important. We'll get to momentarily.
What is a subdomain? It is a domain that is contained.
below a parent domain in a hierarchy. So. Slug is a subdomain of org.
Technically, www. Is a subdomain of slug.org. What is the parent domain? It's a domain that has child domains.
Any questions on that for the moment.
Okay, what is a zone? A zone is an administrative collection of Dns records which contain at least one domain and may contain multiple subdomains.
zones span dot boundaries, or they can. Zones are a human construct.
Domains are a technical construct. Zones are a human construct.
Humans decide where to separate who's responsible for what.
frequently domains are zones. Particularly from the point of view of the big bad internet.
you end up with the root, which we'll talk about in a moment, says it is controlled by one org and says there's this.
org that is controlled by a different organization. That is a separate zone. They are responsible for it.
You go to org, you find that Slug is a separate organization and it has separate administrative people. So it is a separate zone.
You go to slug.org and you'll find that www.sloop.org or balk.sloop.org or.
beta.ww.slug.org. Those are all under Slug. Those are multiple.
addresses in the Slug zone. The zone is the administrative boundary, route is controlled by one group.
org is controlled by another group. Slug controls our own zone.
What is in the zone is determined by the humans.
When you're going between entities is when there is a zone boundary.
So that makes sense.
Lee? Okay. And the picture at the bottom.
Yeah.
is shamelessly taking. from the DNS and bind book by Cricket Lou. There are multiple versions. I consider it to be one of the authoritative tomes on.
Dns and bind as an authoritative or a very.
prominent Dns server can be authoritative and or recursive, whatever you want.
But what we have here is the weird. upside down you.
is the CA zone. which contains multiple things.
in it. However, there are other pieces carved out.
ab.ca. That is a separate zone. and then on.ca is a separate zone, and Qc. Is a separate zone.
It's trying to show how you can have multiple things at different levels in the same zone.
It's one of the better graphics I found. I haven't bother trying to create one of my own.
You could compare a zone to a mounted file system.
And domains to directory structures thereon. So does that make sense? Does the analogy work?
Yeah. the analogy works.
Okay? Does it help separate? zones and domains.
think so? Yeah.
Anybody got a different view of that or one wants to.
All right. Moving on.
suggest that there might be a different way or ask.
If something's wrong, not wrong, but. So for me.
I have a question. the zones be the part after the domain.
and I'll you know, like, you usually have a slash and then something else after that in the URL.
No. No, so I if you can see the screen, I think you're asking about.
the highlighted portion as opposed to the www.slug.org. Is that correct?
Right. Right.
No. That is actually. When you start talking about URLs.
The URL is the whole thing, and there are different pieces and it has its own… nomenclature, which I have to look up because I don't use it very often.
in a better example of. So, there's the root.
zone which knows about. com net org.
Gov. name, what have you, all the.
top-level domains and we'll talk about those in an upcoming slide.
it as. Gary as the root knows about just a few pieces in his zone, in his administrative control.
He knows the other things exist, but he points to a different server and says, go ask that server for something that is in a different zone.
Ron repeated that process to find Slough. Slug can have www.slug.
beta.ww.slugbach.slug. This dot is dot really dot long dot name dot slug.org.
That is all in the slug.org zone like. from the slug.
To the left. is in.
the Slug zone, because that's Slug's administrative control. One of the things that makes domains versus zones tricky is on the Internet, particularly from the root. You're crossing multiple companies, multiple administrative control.
groups to get to sleep. Once you're at Slug, we can do whatever we want in our zone, and it's all within our zone.
But it can be multiple subdomains. all in our zone.
kind of like you can put a whole bunch of files on a mounted file system.
Does that make sense?
You're welcome. The goal is to get it. So if you have questions or want something clarified, please ask.
So. Okay, what is a top level domain? That is com net org.
Example. there's a whole bunch of them. Goog has their own top. Google has their own top level domain goog.
Getting those takes money. Not that they're expensive to purchase.
to get them, you have to demonstrate the ability to run equipment at a certain level and certain resiliency, and the ability to do that to meet the requirements.
Takes money. Like millions of dollars a year money.
There's not going to be a slew of top-level domain anytime soon.
We need a whole bunch more. really rich people before we'll have that.
Grant would now be a good time to talk about our possible new program of charging a membership fee.
No, we canceled that program before it got off the line.
No, I guess not.
We want to teach people, Gary, I'm wagging my finger at you.
Okay.
We charge for copies of the recording.
Yeah, no, I take is 63,000 years to come up with money for our own TLD.
Yeah, by then, it's gonna be trillions of dollars, and we're why are we even running behind that bus? We're never going to catch it.
Okay. Y'all.
The top domain. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
I said, besides which, every TLD has to be authorized by, I forget who does it, but.
ICANN, I think?
It might be. But but the point is, you can't just put one out there. You have to.
go jump through a bunch of hoops, both from a financial, technical, and legal aspect.
to justify it.
Yes. You can't do one officially. There are some alternate DNS trees that make it much easier to do.
But your friends, neighbors, niece. is not going to be able to find it because it's not on the internet Dns tree.
Getting that one is exactly what you described. So does what a top level domain is make sense?
Gary, what's an example? Domain.
wouldn't happen to have a number of how many top level domains there are right now, would you?
Oh, it's an insane number. It's in the thousands.
So like country codes are top level domains as well.
So dot us is a top level domain. I actually have copies of the root zone, and I can look that up.
and if somebody wants to put a reminder in the chat, I will look that up after I finish the screen share.
It looks to be 1,200.
It's lower than I would have expected, but thank you, Lee.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. 9 1,29,700.
Who knows? dispatch.
There's a big difference between let's put a pin in that and come back to it.
the number of them, it is a much larger number. And it will surprise you.
Esta. I'm sorry. What was the question?
Gary, what's an example of a top-level domain? What is an example of a top-level domain?
Yeah.
which is reserved for military sites, navy army that, of course, was originally considered just to be the United States military sites.
gov, which not only is federal government sites, but also you could have them.
Mo.gov, which would be a Missouri subdomain of government.
You're just going for brownie points. You got two top levels and a sub.
And dot edu. The original Edu's were just about all universe, not all universities, but all of the dot edu's tended to be universities in the.
mid 1970s. And of course, now you can wind up with high schools, some even great schools could get themselves a .edu. They do try and enforce all 3 of those.
Domains to be the type of things you would expect. So even though grade schools are now allowed in, they try and make it educational institutions.
dot coms, which are the extreme opposite. Any company, any body can, if they've got the money to pay for it, can register as a dot com for commercial institution.
So, in other words, if you got the money, you can be a dot com.
Yep. Lee, are you feeding him cookies?
see other good examples.
No, I blocked him. One that always frustrates me.
You know, Girl Scout cookies like everything he answers.
But by the way, the actual count is 1593 TLDs in the root servers.
Uh, can you type that number in chat, please?
One of my favorite ones were the original rule has been.
abused, ignored, suspended. There was the .NET domain.net. And originally.
you were only supposed to be in the .net top level domain. If you had something to do with running the Internet. You know, you were an institution that was helping to control it, or, you know, and the stuff that was on.
Something with a .NET domain was supposed to be a part of what ran the Internet and sadly, I don't know who made the decision or how this happened, but.
They let it get sloppy with who they allowed in. So it became a thing where, well, if a company like.
Hewlett Packard. I shouldn't pick. I don't know. Anyway, if a company sold routers, they could apply for a dot net domain because they figured they were in the business. Or if you were a consulting firm, and you were trying to do.
work on networks. Well, they let you sign up as a .NET. That was not the original intention, and so unfortunately, that's one of, in my mind, the most abused domain names, top domain names.
What?
Yeah, the requirements around use. has really slacked off, and even some of the country code TLDs.
LY, and I can't remember the country it's for.
has many people. using their top-level domain that are not.
based in that country. And. Yeah. Thank you.
Libya.
Yeah, like like goog dot le.
Uh-huh.
Oh, okay. Well, that took a while, too.
Hey, we don't mind 14, 4 modems. They get it downloaded eventually.
Okay.
And just to reflect back on that, the reason why there were country code domains is because.
Most of the ones that I described were the ones that were originally envisioned, and they were originally envisioned by the people who were working on this, which at that time was the military and certain educational institutions and.
Yeah, the the dot coms. Yeah, certainly there would be businesses who wanted in on this after the.
University military group got it designed. And well, the thing is, is then rest of the world wanted to do it their way. And while they couldn't change what we had already set up, so coming up with country codes.
as the top level. you know, let countries have their own top level domain and.
Now it's just assumed if something ends in dot com.
It's registered in the United States, whether it's a United States company or not.
But if something ends in .ly. or .fr, or .uk. No, it's whoever's setting things up in that country is controlling the domains underneath that now.
It's almost as if it was a different zone that had its own administrative rules.
Here's here's an interesting one. The dot Su for Soviet Union.
Wow!
uh, was issued, I think, a few months before the Soviet Union collapsed, and I believe it's ICANN or whomever has been wanting to.
deprecate it right out of existence for quite a while now, and Russia has been still playing around with it a bit and making some use of it, maybe selling some of the, uh… selling domains within that zone or whatever.
and so that's that's been causing a little bit of controversy here and there, and… Somebody pointed out that, well, actually.uk is not an official country code for England, but they use that all the time, and nobody's threatening to pull away .uk from England, so should they really be pulling away .su from Russia? I thought it an interesting.
An interesting question.
You are absolutely right. There are some. interesting political heated discussions that happen in the DS community.
Fortunately, it's a very small subset of people that.
Get deep in that. You don't have to participate in that to run your own DNS server with your own domain like Lee, I bet you have not considered.su or dot Uk as you operate Slug on our behalf. Have you?
No, not really.
Okay, so yeah, there, as with everything, there's always some political infighting.
And they are off over in a corner duking it out.
and once one of them comes out is the.
Clear Victor. Then I'll hear what they have to say. But for now.
Not my circus, not my monkeys. So. But yes, very interesting. If you care to get deep into it.
Any questions on top level domains?
Okay. What is the invisible domain component?
And I think somebody I was talking to earlier when we were looking at.
Dns zone file. It's like, do I need the dot after the name or not? And I told him no, because where it was at, it would have caused problems.
The root zone is actually separated from top-level domains by a dot.
But the root zone… How do you represent it?
It is functionally a null character. You don't see it.
There's nothing there, so I will occasionally see it written as, like, root in parentheses.
You will notice it most when you see something like.
www.slug.org. What's on the right side of that last dot?
That's the root zone. So the null root.
Delegates to org. or delegates to Slug type thing.
As you get deeper into Dns. I want to admin your own server. You'll start seeing references to root like the root zone which Lee, I believe you were.
Did you have a local copy of the root zone you queried, or did you do it?
web search to find that.
That has been D handles it. Automatically.
There's a list of root servers, if I remember correctly, that we started with 20 years ago.
Yes, A through M. I don't remember the exact domain name, and I can look it up.
But those are names that are heavily multicast or any casted and multiple instances.
But there is… When dealing with the root zone.
There are references to it. Something to be aware of as you get deeper in DNS.
Any questions?
What makes Www.slug.org. fruit a record inside of the slug.org zone or domain instead of its own zone or subdomain.
Uh, we as the SLUG administrator say it's part of the slug.org zone.
We are not delegating to a separate entity. If there was, um… somebody else who wanted to have a piece.
of sloop.org. like.
Lee might want Omnitech.slug.org. we could delegate that Omnitech.sloob.org.
to Lee, and that would become a subzone. going over to Lee as a separate administrative entity, Omnitech, instead of the Slug organization.
It's what we as the zone operators decide we want to do.
And our use case.
interesting, Stan. I was not aware that dig without any other parameters would list roots.
And this is why we like people that know things. We show up and we learn.
Thank you, Sam. Comments, questions, concerns about.
What is and is not, what determines if it's a zone or subdomain.
Okay. What is the root zone?
We talked about that a little bit earlier. It is the zone, the.
root in parentheses that has no display character that knows about com, net, or mill.
It knows about the top level domains and says they are over at these other organizations. Dns servers. Go talk to them.
It's the collection of what primes the Internet. What is delegation? Delegation is the process that says.
Root says, well, org, that's that other company. Go talk to them. Their DNS servers are.
That is the delegation process. It's actually… Not trying to be recursive, no pun intended, or… wow.
Double. It is. Allowing somebody else.
to be responsible. for a subtree in DNS.
Any questions? Okay.
What is a public suffix? Now we're kind of crossing into web.
Um…
Lee, do you know the difference? from a web browser standpoint.
in dot com. and co.uk, or like example.com.
Versus example.co.uk.
Well, they've got different. They've got different root servers.
Yes, but what will a web browser treat them differently or the same?
I would think the same, but I've never… looked at it.
So they it does treat them the same. But what's happening is dot com.
things. The next domain. below the comm, Google or Amazon or take your pick.
Those are considered. separate companies.
So dot com, multiple things and .com are separate companies.
But much like zones versus domains. You can't rely on that dot boundary.
to say everything in.com. is a separate institution.
Because if you apply that same rule. to Co.uk.
Well, if you say that, everything that is UK.
is a separate organization, but everything every organization down is the same like.
If you treat what's to the left of the top level.
As an entity. You can't do that with COUK.
Because you've got company one.co.uk, company two.co.uk. If we say everything star.co.uk.
is the same entity. That's wrong.
Well, sure, because you got the country code on the end. You have to disregard.
So. Right. The public suffix list says com is a public suffix.
says co.uk is a public suffix, so the things to the left of what's on the public suffix are separate institutions. So.
Company one. to the left of COUK public suffix is.
an institution. And Company 2.co.uk.
public suffix is. institution from Company 1.
And this comes into play in web browsers. When you start talking about same origin or Javascript security policies or cookies.
Some of those can be shared within an organization.
but not between organizations. So there needs to be a list that says.
com is public. Co.uk is public. And a whole bunch more.
net is public, and there are many other. multi domain public suffixes. I just can't think of any right now.
So that makes sense.
Yeah, but isn't that the responsibility of the TLD involved like that Uk?
Why would anybody else care about it? Because the Tl.uk has to has to.
define that logic, not everybody… not everybody that doesn't use it.uk.
Um, I don't disagree with you, but the DNS community is focused on.
records to their value. They're not. They specifically stay out of who is who?
So that leaves a hole, and the browser vendors have stepped up, and I believe it's actually Mozilla that maintain is currently maintaining.
the public suffix list. Because it is more a browser-centric thing for the security measures in the browser.
than it is a DNS issue. It is very closely related to Dns, because it uses Dns extensively.
But it is not a Dns problem. Does that make sense?
That is sorted.
Another way to think about it is. We offer email for SLUG members.
We do not care if they're trading recipes or knitting patterns, or talking about their favorite breed of cat or dog.
That's none of our business. We are in the business to provide the email service.
for the members that use it. It is somebody else that cares.
who's talking about what?
Make sense?
Lee. Okay.
Yeah, pretty much.
It's a weird niche thing that is… closely related, and it's here more as a pointer to if you want to know more.
Go. Take a look at it.
So. That is the question. Oh, go ahead.
I got it.
I can say I doubt very seriously anybody other than us would ever come up with that idea.
Yeah, I'm still not sure that I.
Yeah, I need to. I need to hear more about public suffix. I I don't know if I.
Well, the way I think of it, Gary. Is that there are quite a few domain combinations like the country codes where their domain.
structure does not fit what everybody defined originally like .com.net.org, et cetera. So public suffix is a.
discussion tool. So that you can say dot com is a public suffix and .co.uk is a public suffix.
So that everything to the left of that is an actual domain or company.
Oh, okay, okay. Is that a good way of describing it, Grant?
Yes, company, because… in between each dot is a domain. But yes, company.
Yeah, okay. So the the actual domain entity.
in one case has… One Tld.
For the dot com. For the UK, there's two components to the TLD.co.uk. So you have to have a logical construct such that .co.uk matches your template as well as .com. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gotcha, gotcha. And like I say, nobody but Grant and I would ever want to yak about that, because it's meaningless to anybody else.
It is extremely germane when you're talking about security.
of certain things on the Internet. It is very common in web browsers.
So they know that cookies for… Well, let's just bbc.co.uk.
does not get shared with Amazon.co.uk. the COUK is the public suffix, so things to left of it are separate entities.
But you can share cookies with… Doctor Who.bbc.co.uk and.
blue.bbc.co.uk because BBC is the entity things under it can share cookies and various other.
web-related security settings. public suffix list is very much web centric.
Right.
Which is why DNS. operators tend to go, meh.
Okay.
There's. Oh, wow, I had no idea.
Wow.
Amazon had registered their different. remains as separate PSLs, but that is germane, because people that host things on S. 3.
Not to share. across between S. 3 buckets.
Sometimes it's surprising what you find in these lists.
Yeah.
I put a link to it if you want to.
Did you see the one about in chat about Dns should be org.sloop.
Oh! Ron BC.
Hang on.
I figured that should derail the conversation for a while.
Uh, I wouldn't call it derailed. I'd say pulled into the siding.
Huh. DNS… chose to do.
most specific on the left. other protocols and naming hierarchies did.
more specific on the right. ISO protocol, I think, was more specific on the right.
It's… I don't know why the decision was made that it was.
But that's what was decided in the 80s when Dns was created.
we've been living with it ever since.
And the funny part is, it's used both ways.
depending on what tool or note are what environments you're in.
It can be either way.
And then there's reverse Dns.
Yeah.
Ron, no, that is not a hot take. You are absolutely correct. Dates should be largest unit to smallest unit.
lexical sorting is a thing.
Yeah, it's almost like we didn't learn anything from Y2K.
among other things, yeah.
Why to learn my number 2 lead pencil had no problems working despite the lights going out and the TV going off.
And nothing working right since year 2000.
All I gotta say is that you… What's reading? If it's a computer? Yeah.
Largest to smallest, but if it's a human. I may have a bad habit of spelling out the month.
Because I have really annoying… How about is this the 5th of December or the 12th of May?
Yeah. That's why programmers get confused between Christmas and Halloween.
And I have ruined that joke.
Yeah, I think I might have went over a lot of guys' heads.
Oh.
In 31 1225. Oh.
December 31st, an octal. is the same as 25 in decimal.
Okay.
you.
Okay, okay, that's good.
I've never heard that before, and I didn't get it, so… Boo to me.
I'm sorry, and have fun with it.
Well, you see, so some of us sort of skip the octal generation, because I went from binary to hex, because I never worked on a deck computer.
Okta. Lee Octal or Octa.
Octo.
So…
I would tell you… a UDP joke, but I don't know if you get it.
That's alright, that's why I have an application layer monitoring for things. Go ahead, tell me your joke. It didn't make it to me. Please repeat.
Okay, any questions about Dns from this evening?
So, if I wanted to build a… DNS server in my house so that… Kubernetes could shove.
Records in and out of it without issue. I'll leave my TLDs in Cloudflare.
or the route. and Cloudflare.
Coffer has to be able to talk to those.
DNS servers, right?
It depends if you want somebody outside your house.
to be able to query your names or not.
No.
If you are wanting to leverage. a domain name you have fronted with Cloudflare and your computer on your network to be able to resolve something.
And get to something else on your network. As long as you are using a DNS server in your house.
or in your network. And let's say you have… Kubernetes.example.com, and you're having Cloudflare host example.com for you.
You could, inside your example.com. Zone hosted with Cloudflare. You could delegate.
Kubernetes.example.com. to the a name.
that resolves to the DNS server in your house, so you could delegate.
your example.com. could delegate Kubernetes.example.com to.
Ns. One. dot example.com, and that would resolve to an IP address on your network.
So the Dns server in your house. When clients ask for.
test.kubernetes.example.com. They could go from the root.
root would say talk to com, com would say talk to example. Example would say Kubernetes has been delegated to this name and address.
And then the DNS server in your house would go to that address at your house.
I say could, because you're probably more reasonable than me and would only run one DNS server in your house.
And it would be the DNS server that would have.
Those addresses. So it could just answer them directly. It wouldn't have to go through from the root down. It is authoritative. You ask it for something that is authoritative. It just gives you the answer because it hasn't.
But that is possible.
Yeah, and… And actually, Tyler, there's a lot simpler way of doing that entire process with one file.
and one tool called DNS mask. That allows you to split your horizon.
any name. that you want to define internally. You put in Dns mask.
And DNS mask will resolve at that level with whatever IP you have in your local internal host file.
If it's not in the file, then it will push it out to a normal DNS inquiry externally.
Okay.
Dns mask is a wonderful and terrible tool at the same time.
It is wonderful in what it is capable of doing, and how it just takes the rulebook and mic drop. Why am I bothering with those? I'm gonna do what I want to!
and it is terrible, because it does a mic drop of the rule book and does whatever it wants to.
You can shoot yourself in the foot with it.
But you can also do some beautiful things with it.
Wonderfully and terrible. I personally… my DNS server of choice is Bind.
And that is an 800-pound gorilla that I can get to do a lot of different things. A lot of people say is not possible. I look at the silverback girl, I go, but it's doing it perfectly fine.
Oh, that's what I've been looking at technetium for, is to see if.
It has a DNS and DHCP server or wholesale replacement for.
what I'm running in… Oh.
What are you using now?
Right now, to unify a resolver inside of. See, then if I… DMS.
Or, you know, file.
There isn't. There is a surprisingly good chance it's using DNS mask under the hood.
I wouldn't be surprised. In times of corporate… Our stuff uses stuff I'll take. The problem is, is how do I get it to manipulate it to do the thing I want it to do?
Let alone… I'm sitting here going… I'm gonna set this all up, I'm gonna then blow up my router for some god awful reason, probably because of an update, and… Then I'm gonna have to rebuild it all.
Yep.
Hence my idea of putting this all into, um…
That is why my preference is to use a generic Linux that I have full control over and no restricted interfaces that say, no, you can't do what it's perfectly capable of doing.
It's great for people that want it. Not my good team.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, and that's the other thing. Pixie Birdie, the DNS or the DNS DHCP server in unify will not break out the architectures.
It only gives you one option for the pixie bit.
So if you have some equipment running on its UEFI BIOS.
And some are still working on the old Pixie slash BIOS.
firmware you're screwed. You gotta have one or the other.
Well, that seems limiting and artificial. I have done a little bit of Pxe booting. It's traditional bios based systems. Well.
Not UEFI. Spark servers are not bios based. They are their own firmware.
I would actually be interested in having a discussion about that, probably on the discuss list.
And if you want to talk more about how to set up Dns for what you're trying to do.
I think that would be a wonderful sidebar to work and figure out and then do a base presentation, high level of.
what has been done, and hey, if somebody else wants to try it.
Oh yeah.
So.
Oh, I've been, I promised I would put together a presentation. This is my hang up is… Getting the DHCP booting to work because half of my.
equipment that I tried on is like, oh. We're in BIOS modal or UEFI mode. I'm like.
I can't just pick one, can I? Because that would be simple.
Um, I am…
So hence the reason I've been… because… Every time I've implemented DNS, it's been married at the hip with… DHCP because DHCP usually automatically inserts a records.
for the local clients, I luckily, went out and spent the money on a internal, fully qualified domain that I use and have abused with NGINX.
proxy manager to get. SSL certificates onto my… R720 back here for all my applications, so that when I tell Terraform to go talk to something, it doesn't go, but the certificates self-signed.
Oh, kudos to you, sir. I know your pain. I am sorry.
and it's not going to get any better.
Well, this is… if I want to be a full-fledged DevOps, I got to be able to deal with all this.
hear me.
I would like to agree with you, but I have dealt with too many people over my career that.
It works for me, ship it. That's securities problem after the fact. No, I won't make any change. Make security's life easier. Go away.
Let me put it to you this way. I'm trying to implement Terraform and the work.
The morons find the privileged Access Manager, aka my key vault.
Mm-hmm.
with an internally signed certificate that is. uh, allowed… Only signed by the internal CA and not a public one.
Is it a private? domain FQDN.
No, it's the internal Siemens.net. FQDN. They just went out to AD and got the the internal certificate signed instead of going out to and paying the 60 bucks or 60 euro a year to get the full blown.
certificate.
Oh, I know how to fix it. I fixed it in Python multiple times.
Yeah, um… So the way to fix it, in my opinion, is to take the internal root certificate and add it to the certificate, trusted certificate stores on all your systems.
Um…
Wow, that's if… that's if the programming language follows the internal certificate store.
Python and Java does not.
Oh, I guess… Oh, Java key store tool is a thing. It is a bad thing, but it is a thing.
Yes, and I have it scripted to pull that.
It's been that much of a problem.
I'll believe it. the… So if you're using a private Fqdn, you cannot use public Cas.
If you had a, uh… Fqdn.
from the Internet DNS tree. as your name, you could get an external CA.
to issue a cert or cross-sign an existing cert.
I got it. I already got that, because instead of… Using the ACME protocol, aka Let's Encrypt.
I got it. Nginx to. create a DNS challenge.
So hence the reason why I'm leaving my DNS with.
Mm-hmm.
With Cloudflare. Because there's that application level interface where I can say it can go out and say, I'd like to get a certificate, put this in DNS.
It says, okay, I'll put this text into DNS.
Yeah. Yep.
That makes ThutsEncrypt happy. Who doesn't care that it can't touch the server.
What? Right. It could.
It just it's authenticated. The challenge is has been successful and it's gone on with life.
Yep, it can see the bits it wants to see from its vantage point.
the way I do it is I have my own DNS server.
happens to be at my house, and I update it however I see fit, either.
VI or Ns update, or pick my poison. I could even use Ed, the standard editor if I wanted to.
and I… then have Linode do a secondary zone transfer from my authoritative DNS server.
Out. And the world can get to that. So, when my clients want to do.
renew their let's Encrypt cert. They update the internal Dns server which pushes the update out to Linode. And that is what.
Let's encrypt when they check seconds later, see the record is there.
And that is standard Dns protocols that is not… what people would call an Api today, although I could argue Dns protocol is its own form of Api.
JSON bits bytes. It's all just. Things talking to each other.
It's a protocol in that both parties agree how it is spoken on the wire, and what the different pieces mean.
Stan, I don't know if your microphone's working. I haven't heard you recently. Do you have any?
Comments, questions or concerns?
I'm trying to think of other profanities throughout.
Well, okay. Hopefully, they're not directed at me personally.
No, it's… Zoom is a piece of garbage.
Yes, I agree. uh…
We could talk about meetup instead.
No, this is family friendly.
Jesus.
Oops.
wrong. Do you have any? questions or thoughts?
I'll throw it a thought. Yeah, Zoom sucks. Jitsi sucks maybe worse. Has anybody tried Nextcloud's.
talk app, which is… a WebRTC video conferencing built into Nextcloud.
No, but that's probably on my list of things that I should check.
We'll wrap? Ron, since you're the next cloud fan, why don't you demo it for us?
Sometimes.
Yeah, I find it's.
I… don't have a lot of time to do a full demo of Nextcloud. It's a big project, but I could, uh… You know, I…
That's cloud, just the Zoom equivalent.
You know what? I could do that. Hang on a second here…
Gary, when did you say you needed a presenter for?
You know, bits and pieces for bass was is always good.
And I'm kidding.
Yeah, how about base next month, Ron?
In all seriousness, Ron, even if it was a 5 min screen share of you opening the client and doing something, maybe a.
get Lee or I to connect and show just a hey? Here's what it looks like.
Lee, can you hear me through the new thing?
Cool, let's play with it type thing.
As everyone who's ever done a presentation can attest, you can prepare 10 min of material, and there will be 20 min of questions about it.
Indeed. Yeah, it is.
I think that a good thing?
Let me consider this. I have a little bit on my plate at the moment, but I would almost post.
I… my first thought on doing it is, we meet here, I post a link to there, and we all decamp to there for my presentation portion, and then we come back here for the rest of it.
Um, so that we can all not just watch through a 2D screen of what it looks like, but we can actually take part in a meeting hosted there, and sort of review some of the features and things. Let me… let me give that some thought, if I have time for it. I really do like, um… couple of the things…
about… about it… That I would like to show.
Okay. Cool.
There are 12 months in a year. and it doesn't have to be next month. It could be something following.
Right.
Yeah. No, I'm poking Gary when I say.
I like the way you think, Ron. I mean, that is awesomely different way of doing an online presentation. I started one.
utility. And then, as you say, decamp, go to the other one.
Yeah. Hey, we're going next door. Follow me.
Yeah.
Okay. Ron, do you have any comments about DNS?
Uh, no, I think everything's been covered. I did not know about public suffix, so that was pretty interesting to learn about that. And some of the repercussions had not occurred to me when you were describing the .co.uk.
I was like, man, well, this seems to be, like, moving the decimal over by one. I don't see… oh, right, sharing cookies among all the .co.uk or star.amazonaws.whatever, yeah, that's a serious implication that I… I had not thought of, never heard a public suffix, particularly interesting to me.
Uh, Tyler, do you have any comments, questions about Dns? And I'm just going through the list of participants as Zoom is presenting it to me.
No, I'm just attempting to rebuild my lab using… Talos OS and… Kubernetes and.
This is the last… Major component.
To get the services within Kubernetes to. Oh.
actually be available is because when you… Fire up a… Then external… Service, it has to hit the the Kubernetes cluster with a full name for it right to know where to go.
And usually you… set up a special relationship between the Kubernetes cluster and DNS. So I can just publish those public records.
Yep, and dynamic Dns is a thing. I've done a fair bit with it.
and would actually love to have a conversation with you about it.
So. Uh, Stan, I think I saw your hand went up.
Right. Over the last year, this is a slightly different, but I've started using local.lan in all my designations of my host files.
For each of my different machines, and it seems to me to make a lot of sense, and.
I don't know why… But I seem to have read somewhere that local.land has been.
Deprecated, which… Seems strange.
Um… I'm not familiar with local.lan.
It's kind of in the same category like example.com. It's, you know.
one time it was recommended.
Yeah, example.com. example.com and net and org and start on example are actually reserved.
Ostensibly for documentation, but you can abuse them for your own uses.
home .internal and .lanar for internal DNS.
avoid.local because it's reserved by MDNS which is used by Bonjour, very conf.
That doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know enough about any of those to worry about it.
Yeah. Microsoft.
That's the reason why I spent… Or spend 20 bucks on a domain.
It's mine, it's all mine, you can't touch it!
Yeah. Yeah.
So looks like Brad has his hand raised.
Yes.
Yes, we can.
Yeah, can you guys hear me? Oh, good, sorry. I don't… I know you said you're going through the Zoom names. I have had one of those days that I've only caught part of this presentation, I'm going to go back and look up.
Uh, you cut out if there was a question.
to it. I'm sure.
you were going to go back and watch the pre…
Yeah, I'm driving, sorry, I had to… it was just one of those nights, and I just left the school board meeting.
I was listening to you guys while I was trying to watch the board meeting, because I had to run the board meeting, but… I'm gonna go back and watch the recording, but… As far as you guys are talking about presentations and stuff, I just did a presentation on Acme, and I don't know how much was discussed tonight, because, like I said, I didn't get to watch a whole lot of the meeting.
If you guys want me to do the presentation, it was an hour and a half session at the last conference I was at.
Um, and it didn't go over half an hour. It was slated to be an hour and a half, but it wasn't an hour and a half. It's basically acne with a… Acme DNS server.
Uh, so that's… you can host it, or have it hosted in the cloud, but basically, you're… it's a second… or it's a… to me, as an internal DNS server that does the DNS challenge so that all of your internal certs.
can be publicly supported? And it's… I have a functioning… Demo at work and that I have to move to production as soon as I can, so… Just throwing it out there, throwing it out there.
I think. I think that would be a wonderful presentation, and let's chat more about it on the discuss mailing list and find a time that's convenient for you, and I would love to learn from you.
Alright, and I don't know at all, because I hate DNS, and I've done it for 20 plus years, and everybody I talk to is like, yeah, you're never going to master it. So, um, but I got a working demo, uh… I… I don't know if I've ever been on a discussion list. Uh, I need to sign up for them, and then we can talk about it.
Okay, um.
Okay. If you don't want your. email address known. I mean, you can in the chat, can you can you type stuff in chat while you're driving?
I just pulled into my driveway, so yes.
I would rather…
Okay, I mean, if you put your email address into the chat, I'll see it, and Grant will see it, and we'll be back in contact with you about setting something up to do the presentation. If you don't want it to be released to everybody, just make it a private message to Grant, and uh…
I have one better.
You guys, there we are. You got it, Grant?
Yeah, I already put it out there, but. Go ahead.
Okay, I would. Um, I don't know if you can delete that. Let me copy it.
It does let me delete it. Go ahead and delete it.
Okay. And I actually put the… yeah, you can delete it. I put the wrong thing for my own.
Love that. I didn't know. I didn't realize delete works in cool.
I didn't hear.
But if you're fast enough?
Now, that is… that is my… I worked for Winstall School District. I've been there for 28 years.
My… I have a personal company on the side, it's Dengy PC, used to be PC Tech, but that domain is taken, so I came up with something that probably was never taken. Stnggy PC.
Uh, and then, um… It's an address I don't use a lot, but I'm going to start using it once I can retire, and if I can go to my business full time. So.
But you guys can email me on it. Sure.
Cool.
And it looks like Grant got kicked off for some reason.
Really? Yeah. It looks like we've lost our speaker, Grant Taylor. I don't know why he's off the system, but he may sign back in and may have just been a technical problem. But but yeah, thank you very much for.
talking about. Brad, but doing, redoing your presentation for us. That sounds like could be very interesting. So yeah, yeah, really.
Grant seems to be back now.
Hi, sorry about that. Kind of did something nasty to the bed.
I did to get Brad's email address.
Zoom wouldn't do that. Yeah, Brad, Grant, and Ron, you know, we've been looking for alternatives to Zoom for years.
We tried to set up a Jitsi session about 3 years ago, and this did not go well. So we've been using Zoom ever since.
If somebody has a good open source alternative. And or can… help us get the problems resolved on Jitsi that broke it to ours years ago. We'd be more than happy to talk.
The advantage I see with Zoom is that. Despite all the problems I have with it, the recordings work very well, and it records the chats.
Yep.
and the captions. Um, I independently record.
the Zoom sessions with simple screen recorder. But just in the last week, I have been looking back at Jitsi, and it… I want to do some experimentation with Phil and a couple other guys. I may be going back to using Jitsi for the.
Slack meeting and the new Linux meeting. Because we don't do, we don't record the presentations there.
So…
Yeah, Jitsi is supposed to record now. Yeah.
Oh, really? Like I said, I've only been going looking back at it the last week or so.
And the reason I've gone back to it is they did have a problem where.
everybody came in had, uh… Complete access and could kick anybody else off, and it.
Stan, Stan, that's only if you use the public server.
Memory.
All right. The public server now has the ability for one guy to be the only moderator.
Well, if we're going to do it, you know, we'd set up our own.
That's been… that's changed in the last year. And…
So everybody, everybody that had a.
Well, I wanted to start playing with it to understand what all I can do with before diving into trying to set up a Jitsi.
our own Jitsi server.
Let's talk more details about that on discuss or sysadmin. I kind of want to finish going through, seeing if people have questions about Dns, since that is the.
Excellent.
Good boy. Good point.
topic at hand still. So… Okay. Abdul, do you have any comments or questions about this evening's DNS talk?
And I see you're muted. If you would prefer to type into chat.
That is perfectly fine.
I am Benton Anonymous coward doesn't have any questions.
You say Bill or Phil?
We heard from Brad. Sounds like Brad has an interesting presentation possibility. Gary, do you have any questions?
Oh, Albert, I I I still haven't figured out who's on first.
Don't worry about it, focus about what's on second.
I don't know.
Actually, and now I'm blanking. Blinking blinking, blinking. Blinking, blinking. Yeah.
Oh, boy, now I can't even remember the term. It was late in the talk.
the the 1 2 suffixes were combined. Public suffix list. Yes, that that was a.
Oh, the public suffix list.
a term which, yes, I had heard before, and it completely dropped out of my brain cells. So thank you.
Memory.
John Steinmeier.
Okay, go.
No, I'm sorry, I don't, you lost me way back. So I can't, I can't make an intelligent question.
Well, if even if you…
I'll be watching it probably, you know, uh… on the recording.
0.
Okay, if you have any comments or questions while watching the recording, please ask on discuss or feel free to email me directly and happy to have a conversation.
Okay, thank you very much.
Okay. Phil.
Bill's on mute if he's talking. We'll come back.
Steve, any questions from you?
Okay, I'm unmuted now.
Okay, Phil, buddy old pal.
It was a good talk. You know, a lot of stuff there that was… different, you know, like they were talking about with the, uh… the public staff.
other than that. I guess I noticed one little minor thing that.
a correction, I guess you could say, in the chat. You spelled Dns mask Dnsma, and it's Masq.
So…
Thank you, sir. I would have had to look that up, and I was…
Yeah. Was that a test? Did I pass?
Uh, thanks. And I fail. And so you're doing the next talk on Dns mask sometime in the next 12 months.
So thank you, sir. I appreciate the correction help those looking to research it.
Uh, and Zoom is unhelpfully reordering things on me.
Tony, do you have any comments or questions?
You're on mute if you're talking.
Tyler, I think I asked, but you're next on list. So I'll ask again, and you are muted.
All right. Vincent, you're next up. Do you have any questions or comments? And you are also muted.
All right. Last, but definitely not least, Wayne, do you have any comments or questions? And you.
Thanks for the presentation. I learned a lot. I actually got my own domain, actually several domains in 2002 for a website I had. And at the time.
I knew .com was something I needed, but then I also thought, well, better, if you don't, if you're afraid that there might be competitors that grab the one next to you, I grabbed also at the same time, because they were very inexpensive.
org and .net. And then I learned later that dot net was actually what a lot of people were using for their own personal domains names.
Uh, but then I learned tonight that it really meant something different. It was really meant for the network, for the… for the internet overall. But, uh, in any case, yeah, I still have those domains, which I don't really use. They just forward to.
to my .com domain. And I actually thought .com was for commercial only.
That is what it was originally intended as at enforcement fell by the wayside.
Yeah. Yeah, that's probably like with a lot of them.
Mm-hmm. You're welcome. Thank you.
But, uh, alright, thank you.
Um, with Zoom having crashed on me, and reordering the list.
I, if you have any comments or questions, please unmute and sound off.
I pasted a curl command into chat earlier that.
Is… quite a… an interesting thing to behold.
Can you paste it again? Because…
There's… there's one of them, so it's… it's a web page and a terminal.
Sort of. And the one. So that's that's interesting to look at. It's just like, oh, that's that's clever. But the one that he raised recently was… Uh…
Hot dogstrand.lol.
That one… Yeah… It is, um… Dave from YSAP did… a 25-minute video about the hot dogstand.lol and.
I ended up spending about $90 to 120 minutes on it, pause the video and run the curl, and then… undo the curl output and stuff, and that was… Interesting… Also… mildly painful.
But it was something that, uh, could make a good talk if anybody's interested in terminals, in ANSI codes.
Yeah, that kind of stuff. It… the output is remarkable, and uh… depending on which shell you're running.
you may end up just exiting out, but if you're… a nut bar nerd like me, you'll probably spend 90 plus minutes trying to get your terminal back to where it was.
and good luck!
It's.
Sounds scary. There is actually another one that's kind of interesting, the curl WTTR.in, which gives you your local weather forecast and it's like a web page in your terminal.
Uh, it's overloaded right now, uh, so if you try it, you won't get anything, or at least I didn't, but try it tomorrow and it's actually quite interesting.
Yeah, that's a neat one, too.
Yeah.
It, uh… Knowing tonight's subject matter. I was talking to a group which had a lot of younger folks in it, a lot of students. And the initial reaction was.
Well, yeah, but it's just the way things work. I mean, you know, we don't have to totally understand it. It's just the way things work.
And then it was like, have they always worked that way? And this goes back to I find myself now being old enough to remember when.
Those of us who were dealing with Unix-type systems used to use the bang addresses, and.
Hmm.
Those of you who… Don't. I'll try not to confuse this and just make it short. But if I was going to send something from me to Lee, for instance, if I'm at home.
I may have to send it to an address that would be.
slew physics, and then bang. Bang is an exclamation point. And then after that put Urbana physics and then a bang, and then after that.
foot. Omnitech and a bang and then Lee.
And the difference is is back in those days before we had.
What Grant is so well described tonight, you actually had to put the routing.
into the email address. So what I just described to you is from my system at home.
The 1st thing in an address would be okay. What phone number does it have to call up? Because back in those days we all didn't have.
DSL lines coming into the house. No, you… No, we all had BBSs. It had to dial a phone number and go out on a phone line, so you had to maintain a lookup table.
Uh, on your own computer of, okay, if I'm going to go to slew physics, then.
the modem has to dial this number, and that will try to call… the computer called slew of physics at its phone number.
And then the mail will be dropped off there, and it would show up in the mail system on that computer. The mail system on that computer then would send out its mail, and, okay, the ad… next thing on the address was Urbana Physics, so.
the slew computer would dial the University of Illinois at Urbana and talk to their computer, and it would drop off my piece of mail there. The next part of the address would be Omnitech Lee's company. And so Urbana's computer would have to.
Make a phone call to Lee's computer at Omnitech, and then it would show up in the username Lee.
on Omnitech. But yeah, it. For everybody who went, okay, this was a neat but very technical talk that Grant did tonight. That's why it's so technical, and we completely divorced the world of.
how to get there from what a name means and back in the.
as late as the late seventies, maybe even early 80s. That was the way mail and other things got around. You had to as part of the address, you had to tell it exactly how to get there, including phone numbers or in the late 80s, early 90s. That's when you had Bbs. Yeah.
Um, that is commonly referred to now as source-based routing.
for how to get the message from the source through the multiple hops.
Mm-hmm.
to the end destination.
and I have a minor nitpick with your comment.
Oh.
Urbana did not necessarily have to call Lee. Lee could call Urbana and pick up mail that is waiting for him.
Oh, yep, that's true. That's true.
either side. Basically, it was batched hops, and one side or the other could initiate.
And they would both… it would transfer both ways.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
I have actually done some UUCP-based networking over Ssh.
to have store and forward. That way, it's interesting.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. And at that point.
You, the user, since you had control of exactly which hops it was going through people would.
start to realize whose phones were less busy. Some places you could send mail, and you may have to wait all day before the phone, you know, winds up open that you could, you know, get in on the line to that machine. And I shouldn't just say phoned obviously at some point.
These institutions were getting dedicated lines, and. So, and in fact, that was the way you usually got mail across the country or out of the country is getting to a large company or a university who was willing to, as a public service.
Schlup mail long distance.
Yeah, back in the days when that long distance phone call and sending the data actually cost real money.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm. All right. Anybody else?
I think somebody earlier mentioned about. They had a question on something that was off topic for tonight's talk, and so since it seems like we're slowing down on.
On comments, questions specific to tonight's talk. If anybody wants to ask or comment on something of a broader nature, now would be a welcome time to do it.
already dealt with. Morning. Uh… Terraform.
Running Terraform.
Yeah. Has anybody learned?
Was that question, is anybody running terraform?
Gone through the process of learning Terraform. I'm…
I have not.
For those who are curious, Terraform is a. What they call a desired state language.
that has multiple… Modules, so using the same… JSON structure you.
Can define, let's say I need a Kubernetes clusters with X number of pods.
In there, I need a namespace. And the idea is you're using the same language to define Amazon Web Services.
Azure Kubernetes services. Um, even… Local, there's… I've seen plugins for Proxmox.
It's all just JSON files. Then you say, okay, this is what I want things to look like, and then you turn around and say.
go and it goes out and… pokes all the buttons.
Hmm.
Since I need to convert… I… master project into a Amazon web service. I've been trying to sit here and go through. Okay, how do I not screw this up?
And some of the things it can do is, for example, I'm trying to get it to.
Take all the… Uh, security-based pieces of information that they'd need hold onto and make sure it's stored within a.
Uh, a service like Bitwarden.
Um… having entirely too much… Fun banging my head over it, try and teach it what to do.
Oh.
I don't know if it's my head or just, you know… Dealing with the fact that people can't.
Mm-hmm.
deal or issue proper certificates. You can get them for free from LexiCrick.
Certificates are… a complex world unto their own that has a lot of interaction with.
Internet networking services. And if not done carefully, you can really expose yourself.
or shoot yourself in the foot. a fair bit to it. A lot of times you can get by with knowing little of it, but sometimes it's worth the time to buy a $10 book and read.
And people wonder why I keep everything local.
It's almost like I know that I'm going to screw the damn thing up, and if it's between me, if there's a firewall between me and the rest of my stuff and the rest of the world.
There's less that they can do about it.
Yep. Stay it.
Stan, raising your hand to attract our attention.
Yes. Grant, since this is going to be, or seems to be an ongoing series of you.
thought of what you're going to do next on the DNS.
Just a rough idea or not yet. Parts. Okay.
Not yet. I I have some ideas, and I have recorded some questions from the previous.
base presentation. I envision… We've talked about how to use. I think we were talking about Dns mask.
To stand something up for your home network. And we've talked about Pi Hole, and I would actually be interested in going into.
Presuming the audience is there. More traditional DNS servers.
Bind… And Lee, I'm sure, has something else he could bring to the table.
And if there is interest, even if you wanted to.
go out and register a domain name. What you would need to do to set that up.
Or if you want… to poke something for a few weeks.
without spending some money, I would be willing to do a delegation from one of my domains to people to play with.
And I just generally want to answer the questions to the interest of the audience.
And help enable them to learn what they want to.
make it possible for them to do so.
Just as a note, 10-minute warning.
We're coming up on the 9 o'clock mark. Uh, we don't have to end the meeting, but we used to end it at 9 because of.
when we met at… public libraries, they would throw us out at 9.
It's a traditional warning. Plus… Some of us are approaching our bedtimes.
approaching. Thought we were past.
I have a domain that can be used as kind of there for a project that I never got around to.
need to… I can point the… Registration, anyway.
I don't care what happens to it. I was kind of waiting around what happened with French Indonesia and the .io domains.
Yeah.
Interesting.
io domain. Oh, Indian Ocean.
Input output. Oh. Hmm.
French… It used to be the, uh… British Indian Ocean Territories.
Which were some islands that got returned to you.
Oh, wow.
Sure, either India or one of the… Um…
I think it got handed over to Madagascar or Mauritius or something.
Rascals? So, yeah.
Um…
Yep. How should I put this? So it's kind of been in flux, and I had a blog that I wanted to throw up there using… flag tail.
Yes, I am using… Log rebuild as a… Oh.
How should I put it? Guinea pig to my machinations.
Yeah, as one does. I've done silly things like that and learned a lot.
But yeah, I can point the registrar entry anywhere you want, and… You can play with it that way. It's like RMDIO.
I've got a. a request for a party who hasn't shown up yet. He said he was going to try and log in when he got.
got out of another commitment that he had earlier tonight.
But I know what his question is. He's he's forced to use Microsoft.
at work. He really. was with our group as a Bsd user. He was always having more fun on BSD than he was on Linux, and uh… Uh, but now he's building a new box and figures, okay, he's going to put Linux on this box.
And as I say, he's an experienced BSD user, but his question was kind of like, okay.
Has anybody got enough? Memory familiarity with VSD that you know what what what?
distro of Linux. would be useful, appropriate for somebody who considers themselves. Well, who should be considered a competent BSD user. What? What are the pros and cons of any particular distro?
Anybody have an opinion? Make any difference. You want a good virtualization learner?
Okay.
Me… to me, the question is… How much… freedom and configure.
Capability. Freebsd has a lot of freedom under the port system and.
compiling world. If he's did things like that and enjoys that power.
He is probably going to be happier on arch or Gen 2, or a compile from source.
Distro. If instead looking for ultra stable.
And you can measure uptime bounded by power outages on either end of 2 to 3 digits.
Probably not.
mainstream distros.
I might actually recommend FreeBSD.
Yeah, you can get Red Hat and Seuss to be extremely stable.
Fedora by nature of what it is, is a science project all the time.
Same thing for tumbleweed. But you know, there's they're stable versions next month.
Yeah.
I'm trying.
But yeah, that that question, though, there's a question under that. What's your host os?
Well, that wasn't the question. You know, you mentioned a working Windows environment.
Well, if it's bare metal. It…
Well, his his his real environment at work is Microsoft Windows. Anything? Is that where he wants to run the Vsd? And that is the question. Is he going to try and… run this as a virtual machine.
on a Microsoft host or does he just need to?
Yep.
I took the question as to be as a Bsd user who is forced to use windows at work. What Linux distro would you recommend he use at home? Is how I took it.
Yeah. I think that's the 1st thing he should be answering for himself is, yeah, exactly as you just described it, Grant.
how to kind of get his Linux specific skills.
Back up to speed. Well, the question is, if he wants to run free BSD at home.
Hmm.
Why not bear hardware? If he wants to run it at work, you're going to have to deal with Windows and run it under Wizzle, and it's not going to be, uh… good solution. Pre-bsd is compatible with Wizl, but.
You know, you're running all kinds of UI issues. Yeah, no, he's not going to run it at work. This is strictly a whole home.
whole machine. Yeah, well, if you want multiple machines, then your best your best bet, from what I'm seeing here is Proxmox.
That's a. It's supposed to be more compatible with BSD than any other tools. Okay.
It's prox m-ox. Yeah.
Yeah, Proxmox is. hypervisor tuned distro to run.
virtual machines on. I like VMware or Hyper-V or Zen.
Except it's as closer to yeah, it's closer to being VMware than anything else, because.
It's designed to run on bare hardware, and then you manage it remotely.
Yeah.
you know, but you could also run Kvm.
Yeah, I think there's a healthy component of Kvm in Proxbox.
If… Yeah. I think it's more… I think it's basically Debian.
With KVM.
Yeah. It is to me rocks box is a Debian based distro heavily optimized or tuned for virtualization hosting.
Okay.
To me, it really depends more if. This person wants to do… compilation and control a whole bunch of different things, or if just wanting ultra stable to do day-to-day activities.
Because BSD can go both ways.
Of course, a better solution is go get yourself a Pi 4 for your BSD.
or 5.
Well, it sounds like. for whatever reason, he's wanting to make the transition to Linux.
instead of Bsd, and is asking what would be a recommended Linux to try.
Yeah, I think that's more what he's driving at is is putting up a Linux.
so he can. get back into the Linux world and get.
brushing off his Linux experiences. even though, like I say, his background, he's really more of a Bsd user from from.
I would also ask the question of. Is he trying to… freshen up his Linux experience.
to help support something at work, and if so, I would probably lean towards whatever distro is being used at work.
Yeah, I I got the feeling from him that that wasn't the case.
Because… Okay.
I mean. You can do Fedora. I would probably run Red Hat proper over Fedora, which you can get developer licensing for free that gives you either 8 or 16.
Red Hat. Enterprise Linux.
We're free for non-commercial use. Um… Debbie and I find their politics annoying.
Mm-hmm.
like you don't get thunderbird. You get the Thunderbird code branded as something else with different icons, but it's Thunderbird by it.
Well, if you're really a Red Hat fan, why not go Almo?
ice or something.
I would say if you were happy with CentOS Alma, probably. But particularly if you're trying to get.
learn how to support Red Hat in a commercial environment. There are aspects of Red Hat like Red Hat Network subscriptions, etc.
That are Red Hat specific. So REL, you actually get more proper hands on.
Um… A comparison could be like, it's been a while since I've driven cars, and I want to get back up to speed, and I plan on driving a big rig truck.
which is a fair bit different than passenger vehicles.
really depends on the end goal.
I think it was a smart… idea for him to basically see if anybody here in the group.
They had enough cross experience between the BSD world and the Linux that might be able to clue them in.
Okay.
And the most I did with that was fight with it for TrueNaz before they switched over to Debian.
I'm sorry. I was a little… that was a little garbled, Tyler.
The most I've done with that, with, uh… Uh, FreeBSD, well… I guess I also had the PFSense firewall that was running FreeBSD, but that was all through the UI.
My return as core, the old version of TrueNAS.
is for our free BSD, and I was mucking around with the inside of it to get it to do what I wanted it to do, but… They just switched over to using Debian themselves with TrueNAS scale.
And are going to deprecate. course sometime.
I I I think we should not give an answer here unless we know more about what his end goal is.
I say, with me, I… I'm looking to replace Windows on my VR set or.
VR rig. And I am actually looking at using Cache EOS, because there's instructions on setting up SteamVR on that OS itself.
Not that I want to deal with Arch or I want to… X, Y, or Z.
It's because there's the instructions that do what I need on that OS.
Yeah. And I think that's a good motivation for that.
No.
particular distro.
Yeah, you know, if you've got a specific use case.
Then you want to focus on the distro that best supports that use case. You know, if you're building a server, you don't need a GUI. So who cares whether it's X or Wayland or whatever. Yeah. You know, you build a server and leave the GUI off. If you want a desktop.
Then you gotta have you got to pick your GUI X your wayland's current X is, you know, more compatible. But I found a lot of problems with that here in the last year. That's why I had to switch to humble weed and whaling. Okay.
Yeah, with me, I had, uh… I switched over to Bazite, which seems to be a problem, because they have this whole atomic mindset that just drives me nuts as a.
My programming… Um… But I switched to it because it was using Wayland, because X kept on eating through.
Over half of my video memory. And whenever I would fire a game up, I usually play a game and I throw up something that I need to listen to that's, you know, dry and repetitive.
And… It just everything would tank where it was working just fine.
before on Linux meant it was like, okay, what happened to the to my video memory here?
Something in X. was eating half my memory. I'm like.
That would have to be the X display server.
Oh, this isn't acceptable.
the what actually talks to the video card, because.
Arguably the rest of X is. relatively small libraries.
Great. I just don't know what happened. I'll just open up MVTop to check what was going on with my graphics card in the middle of my game playthrough, I'm like.
Why are you using 4GB of memory while I'm sitting on the desktop in the video card?
Reboot it. Goes away. Like… This is annoying.
That almost sounds like caching.
And you know what? I hate to say it, I have $1,000 worth of memory in this system.
It's not using the $1,000 worth of memory, it's gotta use the memory on the video card.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm thinking the video, uh, the X server is using caching inside the video card.
for, like… cells are pre-rendered things to avoid having to re-render them.
And it.
and arguably, if you've got the memory and it's not being used for anything else.
Why not let the video memory use it?
Yeah, right until I launch… video game, and he says, oh, I need to load the video game into memory, and it's used by… What?
That's it.
I…
Seems like a badly designed program.
Somebody made a mistake in the programming just to automatically default to video memory instead of the RAM with whatever's already on the system.
No, I'm thinking, like, the video card itself. rendered something and cached internally.
I'm guessing something within cinnamon. Decided, oh, we're going to use the video memory to do X, and they didn't write a cleanup that says, oh, by the way, when.
XYZ starts up… You're to exit.
And you should let the video card use this and it's like.
You know, it's X, it's older than dirt, there's like, what, two people working on it?
Yeah, the biggest problems with X, it's your your old spaghetti code.
Maybe? And so…
There's been so many people working on on it for the last 30 years that.
There's there's problems in there that nobody know how to fix. Nobody knows how to fix.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. All right. Should we pull the plug, Gary? I want to ask one more question which may spark a little discussion. But last month this meeting last month our speaker was from Red Hat.
And he spoke about boot C after a month of thinking about it. Did anybody have any comments, follow ups, questions?
I guess I meant to prompt for that in the discussion email. I just never had a chance.
I've gone back and looked at part of the video.
Uh, recording that Stan graciously makes available. And to gather some details about how the file system is working, and I actually posted those to discuss.
I have a desire to explore. that capability.
But not necessarily under boot C. But I do have a habit of playing with Lego sets to find the pieces I like to pull out and use in my own custom builds.
Okay.
Sorry, I'm having too much fun with Talos. The thing is tiny.
Okay. I mean, my comment was, I've been using Boot C for 10 years in Butterfs.
The exact same concept. Except it's more flexible in butter.
I would say that. It is a similar high level concept.
the execution of how it does it is completely different.
Well, yeah, because you have a file system that you can version, basically.
Versus a container, you have to modify and then.
swap in and in or out. you know, the the advantage about Rfs is you can have any number of versions there instead of one you're using, and one you're switching.
from looking at it, I don't think that the what's being used.
is limited to two versions. That probably is more.
an artificial. Side effect of boot C is a higher level.
construct.
Well, the the problem with Bucci is you're running one, and you're switching to one. You've only got 2 versions.
Maybe with Bootsy, but I see no reason why.
with what it's doing to the file system underneath, you couldn't have.
40, pick a number.
Well, yeah, that's that's butterfs.
No.
No, I'm saying if you want to use the file system to version your.
But if you want to use the file system itself to version your file systems.
then ButterFS provides that. Boot C, you have the running version, and you have the switching version.
And if the switching version fails, you can go back to the one that you started from the way the way I understood it.
But with, you know, with ButterFs, I have to look every few every every month because I may have 10 or 15 different snapshots there. Yeah. Okay.
in which case, I throw all of them away except for the last 3 or 4.
Okay.
something to keep in mind with the way Boot C is, and I can't. It's not.
overlay is part of it. I'd have to open my email to find what I sent.
Um…
It's… Compose FS.
and overlay combined. It is using object store. So if you have the same.
File, the library or ISO image, or what have you, a blob for all intents and purposes, that is the same across multiple versions.
It is one copy on disk. that is instantiated.
as many different versions as you have, like a hard link to it.
And it is switching… not quite link farms, but similar.
So if you have… multiple successive versions.
of an Os, but 90% of the files are not changing.
you're only going to have, call it a 10% growth.
with each version. Whereas if it's a full snapshot.
Unless it's copy on right, you're going to end up with more disk space consumed for versions.
and I'm not sure if Butter is using copy on right or not.
But there is copy on right?
So so the the the concept there is similar.
you know, and and but in the butter case, the file system handles the versions.
in the Bootsy case. You've got.
Some another construct running on top of the file system that's keeping track of your two versions.
Yeah.
Okay, I don't know that that almost sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
Anyway. Okay. let's see.
Couple other things I just stumbled across here in the last couple of weeks.
Doherty Business Systems was a benefactor of our group for a number of years. We used to hold our steering committee meetings there, and they've also benefited some other groups around town. I noticed that the St. Louis Data Visit.
Visards group is desperately looking for a new leader, which made me wonder, hmm.
Why are they folding? And here's the one wants to pay 100 bucks a month. I I guess, and I suspect probably Doherty had been doing that. Doherty also used to provide the meeting space and.
food and that kind of stuff for the meetings of that group. And then I think in 2024, they only met three times and haven't met since, which made me wonder… I hadn't heard.
Anything from Doherty in quite some time. And so, yes, Doherty Business Systems sold themselves to a Canadian company from Montreal, uh, that was effective, uh, I guess January of last year.
And I noticed that Ron Doherty is now the head of the Doherty Foundation and they're involved in doing charity stuff for Alzheimer's disease and some other medical stuff. So I don't know if Ron is still.
working with. the new merged company, or the new owners of his old consulting firm, but so yeah, I I don't know. So just those of you who are here in town changing what's going on in town.
So with that, yes, I guess unless somebody has something else that we need to discuss tonight, we can wrap it up for this evening.
We'll all meet again.
I will toss out there. If you have questions.
you would like to see or hear answered in the larger DNS theme.
Please let somebody know so we can make sure we talk about them.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Very good. With that, before we turn off the recording. This has been the St. Louis Lug, the St. Louis Linux user group. Today's date was Thursday, March the 19th, 2026. Our speaker this evening was Grant Taylor.
who was doing part of his series on DNS. I was DNS. Who's on first? What's on second? And it was kind of the working walkthrough of how these DNS requests get handled. Thank you, Grant. It was an excellent talk tonight.
Quick question. Anybody using AI tools? What type?
Oh, yeah. You're. Chat Gpt. Mostly, I'm building my own now.
I've been using chat, too. I'm sorry?
What use case? What type of use case for for Dns management, or what?
OS. Play.
Oh, just meeting on some of my computers, network, whatnot.
Mm-hmm. I was thinking small projects, or maybe one or two committers, if somebody builds an agent that updated the email list when there are problems, and set up discussions, that would be a good use case.
Yeah. I'm amazed at how effectively they understand English.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, probably know the language better than us. They study more about it. They can look at more of the ones who have large memory.
And that'd be a use case with mailing lists when everybody who has got a copy downloaded a copy of a version, when you got an updated version?
And then… but if they submit it back to human review, that'd be even better.
Scott Graneman has offered to do a presentation on various.
So this is Zoom time.
AI tools and so forth, and it may be in our future, in the next month or so.
That'd be great. Okay.
That'd be great. posted to the list.
Right, Gary?
All rightMm-h