Wednesday, September 23, 2009

PowerDNS competitor Nominum lauds its closed source credits!

This morning, I was unpleasantly surprised by an advertorial on ZDNET, where PowerDNS competitor Nominum stated that since they are closed source, their technology is inherently more secure. They also cleverly compared Open Source to malware. Nice.

In addition, Nominum stated they have not had any security problems, "unlike the freeware legacy DNS", but this simply is not true as can be seen on their own webpage (which will probably be 'cleaned up' shortly).

There are some true gems in the interview, cleverly titled "Why open-source DNS is 'internet's dirty little secret'".
Freeware legacy DNS is the internet's dirty little secret — and it's not even little, it's probably a big secret. Because if you think of all the places outside of where Nominum is today — whether it's the majority of enterprise accounts or some of the smaller ISPs — they all have essentially been running freeware up until now.

Given all the nasty things that have happened this year, freeware is a recipe for problems, and it's just going to get worse.

Followed by:
Correct. So, whether it's Eircom in Ireland or a Brazilian ISP that was attacked earlier this year, all of them were using some variant of freeware. Freeware is not akin to malware, but is opening up those customers to problems. So we've seen the majority of the world's top ISPs migrating away from freeware to a solution that is carrier-grade, commercial-grade and secure.
And the real screamer:
Nominum software was written 100 percent from the ground up, and by having software with source code that is not open for everybody to look at, it is inherently more secure.
Way, way back when, Nominum employees successfully performed a denial of service attack on PowerDNS. I thought they had grown over this kind of behavior, but it appears they didn't.

Nominum used to be a part of the DNS community, interacting with the IETF in the standards setting process. It may be harder for them to credibly contribute anymore if this is their stance on open cooperation..

UPDATE: It is ironic to note that at the time of writing, one of the Nominum.com nameservers was actually running BIND ('freeware, not akin to malware'). In addition, both the webserver and the operating system for the Nominum webpages run on open source software (Apache, Linux).

Monday, September 7, 2009

PowerDNS & PowerAdmin contributor Jorn Ekkelenkamp has passed away

I'm almost too hurt to type..

Copy pasted from the PowerDNS mailing lists:

Dear PowerDNS friends,

I'm deeply saddened to have to report that Jorn Ekkelenkamp passed away yesterday, at the tender age of 26. He died battling Leukemia. Jorn was also known as Sjeemz on the #powerdns irc channel.

At ISP Services (later known as Hubris) Jorn was perhaps the very first large scale user of PowerDNS, in addition to authoring the first PowerDNS web management solution, PowerAdmin.

His belief in PowerDNS, and his subsequent deployment, paved the path for much of what we have achieved over the years. PowerAdmin also helped people use and migrate to PowerDNS. In addition, he frequently suggested, tested or even funded new PowerDNS features.

Jorn will be missed very much. He was truly a PowerDNS man from the very first hour.

His girlfriend and family were aware of Jorn's contributions to the open source world and the Internet. If PowerAdmin has made your life or work better, or if you've benefited from his other contributions to the PowerDNS community, please drop me a message, and I'll relay to his family, who will appreciate hearing about what Jorn meant for other people.

In addition, there will be church service Saturday morning - I can relay the details if you want to attend.

I wish his family and everyone who knew Jorn lots of strength in dealing with this tremendous loss.

Bert Hubert
PowerDNS.COM