A Measurement-Based Study of the Optimal Value of DNS Timeouts
| Abstract | Paper |
The Domain Name System (DNS) is an Internet service that allows domain names, such as www.ursinus.edu, to be used in place of IP addresses, such as 198.17.40.106. DNS is consulted every time a host attempts to use a domain name for email, instant messaging, and many other Internet applications. Despite having been developed over 20 years ago, DNS is extremely robust. However, it is still possible for errors to occur...[read all]
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
For this first post, I'll recap what I've done up to this point and what I plan on getting done during the next
week. During the summer (Summer Fellows at Ursinus), I began all of this research. Playing with some ideas with my
professor, we came up with the idea of the timeout that occurs for DNS queries. After reading into other DNS
research, I developed some ideas to collect data that we could use to analyze this timeout. Several ideas
and scripts later, we had our set of RTTs for 1000 different nameservers. We analyzed this and I developed the
first version of the paper that I had to hand in as a final product from the Summer Fellows program.
Now, in the Spring semester, I have been continuing the research in order to prepare the paper to be submitted to a
conference. So far, I have mainly been further researching work already done in the area. I have been focusing on
more recent work during the past few weeks, in order to get a better understanding of the current state of DNS
research before submitting a paper. In addition, I will be setting up a test in order to examine the effects of
using a BIND nameserver with the timeout scheme altered in relation to our results. Those results will allow us to
make observations and suggestions about the plausibility of lowering the default timeouts.