Topic: Choosing a secondary DNS server, now with data! Presenter: Aaron Joyner When: Thursday, 10th October 2013, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm) Where: NC State Engineering Building II Room 1025, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps Video: YouTube

Abstract: Are you responsible for a DNS domain, perhaps professionally, or a "vanity" domain for your personal email?  Have you given much thought to the DNS resolvers for that domain?  Every domain requires at least one DNS server, and everyone has probably heard that they should have a geographically disparate secondary server to hedge against catastrophic outages (network, building, etc).  Assuming you don’t have the luxury of a globally distributed set of datacenters, where should your secondary DNS server be hosted?  This talk will present one man's quest to answer that question, along with the data used to visualize and understand the available options.  There will also be a brief discussion of how that data was collected, and open source code (in Go, http://golang.org) to do it yourself.

Bio: Aaron S. Joyner is a Sr. Systems Engineer in the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) group at Google. He has been working as a SysAdmin for more than 15 years at companies such as Global Knowledge, Intrex.net, and MWG Biotech. When living in Raleigh, he was actively involved with the Triangle Linux Users Group, serving on the steering committee as SysAdmin in 2004-2005, and giving talks on DNS for NC*SA and TriLUG. Since joining Google in 2005, he has helped to maintain their internal DNS infrastructure and been primarily responsible for designing, implementing, and supporting Google's serial console systems.  For the past ~4 years, he has been leading a team of SREs responsible for supporting production authentication and machine management systems.

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NCSU Host: A big thanks to the Office of Information Technology and NCSU for making the room available during Fall Break.