I am looking to setup a public DNS server and I found this DNS server

https://technitium.com/dns/

Does anyone know what the risks are of exposing the DNS port to the internet? How likely am I to get compromised? Is this a really bad idea?

  • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.comEnglish
    54·
    10 months ago

    DNS is plenty secure due to its simplicity and age. From the perspective of securing your server that is. DNS has numerous flaws when it comes to security in terms of can you trust the resolved name. But that is another matter.

    I’d be more worried about the gui, keep that behind a secure proxy or don’t expose it to the internet at all if we’re talking a server at home.

    I run my own DNS and it’s virtually a prerequisite if you want to host stuff under a personal domain in a smooth fashion. At least if you don’t want to rely on a big player like say Cloudflare.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I’ve had my own domain since the early 2000s and have never needed to run a public dns server. Couldn’t, in fact, due to not having a static ip address. Sure, I run one internally but it’s complicated enough to setup “properly” that I leave the external resolution to the big players. I doubt anyone’s home setup will be more reliable than route53…

      Commercial dns services are cheap as chips and make it easy to add records. You can often automate it with terraform or sensible as well. I can’t think of any good reason not to use one.

      • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.comEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        And I explicitly said “unless you want to rely on a big player”.

        Personally I’m very fed up with AWS, Cloudflare and Google virtually owning the modern Internet. I selfhost to get away from their spying and oligopoly so routing DNS through them is simply out of the question, for me.

        And really it’s not that hard these days with pre-packaged Docker containers. I have a fairly complex setup and while I have put hours into it it wasn’t rocket surgery by any means. It’s also quite healthy to understand how DNS actually works if you work with the Web imo.

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Personally I’m very fed up with AWS, Cloudflare and Google virtually owning the modern Internet. I selfhost to get away from their spying and oligopoly so routing DNS through them is simply out of the question, for me.

          I get that - but part of the reason for the current situation is that DNS is such a bad protocol that is risky to leave in unskilled hands. You can do damage beyond just your host. DNS is a big target and servers can find themselves participating in DDOS attacks. The big players do traffic analysis and rate limiting to minimize these things.

          And really it’s not that hard these days with pre-packaged Docker containers.

          It’s not that it’s “hard to run a name server” it’s that it’s tricky to configure one correctly so as to be a “good neighbor” on the internet. Most homegamers only need a single “A” record anyway - maybe some CNAMEs. It’s not like you need anything complicated. And if you don’t have a static IP address then you definitely want your DNS server to be updatable easily with a new IP. Updating NS records is more complicated.

          Running an internal name server is fine and a great experience. You can do so much more on your own network than you would likely do with a public name server anyway.

          • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.comEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Only doing resolution for your own domain and dnssec solve pretty much all those issues and is pretty darn easy.

            And I did say that the web gui is what you need to lock down, DNS has no vulnerabilities exploitable through port 53 that lets an attacker take control of the server.