Mark Jeftovic - Managing Mission. Critical Domains and DNS: demystifying nameservers, DNS, and domain names

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Mark E. Jeftovic is the cofounder and CEO of easyDNS Technologies Inc, the managed DNS provider and domain name registrar. He was formerly a director to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) and is currently a director to the Internet Society Canada Chapter.

Mark entered the internet space in the early '90s as a computer programmer and Unix sysadmin, working for the early dial-up ISPs in Toronto before cofounding a web development firm in 1995 that later morphed into easyDNS.

A lifelong guitarist and avid bookworm, Mark lives in Toronto with wife Angela and daughter Emily.

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Domain names and DNS can be thought of as the basic foundation of the internet. If you want to explain how important DNS is to somebody, you might find the following useful; this has been my "30-second elevator pitch" about DNS for close to 20 years now:

What is interesting about DNS, given its importance, is how overlooked it is in the overall scheme of IT. Similarly, domain names (the logical naming entities that anchor DNS lookups) are often the most profoundly misunderstood facets of IT as well, even by otherwise advanced technical personnel.

For some reason, DNS and domain names seem to be a blind spot in many organizations' infrastructure. As we have fondly quipped since our early days as a managed DNS provider, "DNS is something nobody cares about until it stops working".

It never fails to amaze me that a company can spend thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars on redundancy, high availability, firewalls, disaster recovery plans, and even cyberthreat insurance, and yet the entire technical infrastructure of the organization is held up by a couple of unpatched, forgotten nameservers gathering mold in a closet somewhere. Often, this can be the case without a given company being aware of it, because they simply allow their (pick one) web host, registrar, ISP, data center, or some other vendor to handle the DNS for them, perhaps as part of a bundled offering, and they have absolutely no knowledge of the state of the DNS infrastructure deployed by that vendor.

Following on from that theme, perhaps the DNS infrastructure may be beyond solid: anycast deployments, DDoS mitigation, hot spares, uptime monitoring, and 24x7 NOC support; but the portfolio of domain registrations are managed haphazardly or on an ad hoc basis. The smooth running underpinning of the organization is ripe for disruption by an unintentional domain expiry or a domain registration getting "slammed".