Simon MottAll about me
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Simon Mott

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2 Articles

Slow DNS resolving using bind9 as caching resolver

by Simon

I currently have 4 DNS servers across my estate and until recently these were all configured to forward all queries to Google DNS (8.8.8.8). I ended up having an issue with Google caching an undesired record value so I opted to change my DNS servers so that they no longer forward queries elsewhere, but instead try to answer it themselves; Doing this gives me slightly more control over my DNS cache.

As I use named (bind9) this was a pretty trivial change – Simply remove the forwarders { 8.8.8.8; }; clause in my configuration and that should be that.

During my post-change testing though I’d noticed that resolution was taking significantly longer for un-cached queries than I’d expect (microsoft.gointeract.io is only used to illustrate my issue):

Office 2010, KMS Activation and Domain Relationships

by Simon

Whilst this seems trivial to some people, not only did this issue affect my office, but one of our branches in India too so I figure its worth noting somewhere!

My current employer has many operating companies (OpCo’s) dotted around the world, all under one brand. Because of this structure, our OpCo in the UK has a two way trust relationship between our domain and the parent company’s. For arguments sake, lets call them UKNET and CENTRALNET.

At the end of last year we were told to use a Microsoft KMS server hosted on CENTRALNET to install Office 2010 on some of our workstations. Easy.. or so we thought.