Hello,
I just had a conversation with Arne about our DNS setup right now.
We see are couple of problems which have been ongoing for a long time and we have worked out how we are going to solve them. In this email, I would like to involve everybody else in this conversation and hopefully you people have some ideas how to make this even better!
First of all we have some unreleased features:
* Safe Search is implemented, but there is no UI to enable it
* We can force unbound to only use TCP which circumvents some problems with corrupted UDP packets. No UI either.
Then we have our long test script which we have tweaked a lot but it is largely a black box for users and therefore does not work. I am strongly believing in that we need to get rid of it. Entirely.
However, there is some other objectives that we would like to realise at the same time:
* Being able to configure more than two name servers
* Lay a foundation for DNS over TLS
* Allow for users who really really really do not want any security to disable DNSSEC. For some reason they believe that the security is causing their DNS problems when it is usually not.
* Adopt some recommended configuration from DNS flag day (EDNS buffer size = 1232)
* Remove the many places where users can configure DNS servers depending on how they connect to the Internet (Static, DHCP, PPP, …)
So the solution that we have come up with is as follows:
* Remove automatic fallback to recursor mode. This seems to confuse people and they think that this is something bad. No idea why. People.
* Remove the test script.
* DNS servers can be configured on a new dns.cgi by the user. It will be a list which can hold as many DNS servers as you like.
* DNS servers will be stored in a CSV file and when we receive some from the ISP (via DHCP or PPP) we will add them and flag them as coming from the ISP
* There will be a switch to enable/disable using the ISP DNS servers
* We will remove the UI from the setup. That will result in people who use static not being able to configure any DNS servers during setup. We will compensate for that by changing to recursor mode when no DNS servers are known. That is the only thing we can do here since we do not want to ship a default list of DNS servers.
This will simplify the whole DNS problem by only providing one UI for everyone regardless of how they connect to the Internet. The user has a lot more influence on what is being configured so there should be less of a chance of useless DNS servers there.
Does anybody have any objections or additions to this?
Since this is going to be a huge project I am looking for people who would like to join in and contribute their time :) Hands up!
Best, -Michael