DNS expert Cricket Liu this month will release the latest version of his book entitled "DNS and Bind," one of the definitive textbooks about the Internet’s Domain Name System. Liu is vice president of architecture for InfoBlox, which sells network appliances that handle DNS and other related protocols.

I spoke recently with Liu about the status of DNS and the looming threats for corporate network managers. In the next two issues of the Service Provider News Report, I’ll provide excerpts from our conversation.

Q. How would you describe the state of the DNS?

A. We keep hanging new applications off of DNS like Enum. [Enum is an IETF standard finalized in October 2000 that allows an end user to type a telephone number into a Web browser and access a list of corresponding Internet resources for that number, such as an IP address.] Then we extend the protocol with DNSSEC and IDNs. [DNS Security Extensions is an IETF standard that uses digital signatures to provide authentication of DNS zones. Internationalized Domain Names are an IETF technique for supporting foreign language characters in domain names] We keep on adding all of this stuff, but we don't take into account the fact that DNS in its pure form is fairly tricky to administer. The syntax is notoriously unforgiving. Name server operations is a black art. DNS is going to be an interesting area because a lot of these new applications like Enum have gravitated towards DNS because there is no other global look-up service on the Internet. But people are having a hard time with DNS as it is today without trying to manage user data in zones or trying to sign zones.

Q. You mentioned Enum. Where is that service at in terms of deployment?

A. There has been very little adoption in the corporate sector as far as I can tell. I just ran 11 seminars in Europe, and not one attendee was doing an Enum implementation. Any Enum adoption is happening at the carrier level, and the carriers are monkeying around with it rather than deploying it in production mode.

Q. How long will it be until Enum is a widely available service?

A. We’re likely to see something in two or three years.

Q. For years, DNS was a backwater in corporate networks. How serious are corporations about their DNS infrastructures today?