I signed up and saw they only allowed a single subdomain for DDNS, with docs saying to contact support if you needed more. I emailed asking for just 1 more subdomain and support told me that for my usecase I should just use CloudFlare.
That’s good to know! I was actually very excited when I first found them; I was surprised that there aren’t many free/open public DNS hosting services.
When I last tried deSEC, the service was reliable and well worth the price of admission, but the web UI and API were both quite rough, and propagation tended to be quite slow. It was annoying to do an ACME DNS01 challenge on it, for example. IIRC, the API didn't have a complete set of replace/edit endpoints, so even DNSControl (https://github.com/DNSControl/dnscontrol) would leave records nonexistent for a while while during updates.
As an aside (though this certainly applies to deSEC) it's strange to me how so many DNS services (free or paid) struggle to import simple Bind zone files, often either giving a vague error ("one or more records could not be imported"), mangling records, or even just silently omitting records. Parsing a zone file has some gotchas, but it doesn't seem like it should be that hard.
Recently migrated to deSEC, great experience so far, except for hitting the API rate limit when using Tofu to plan and apply changes with around a 100 domains. For now I'm using `-parallelism=1` which seems to work.
> We found deSEC to be the only affordable DNS supplier in the EU that complies with state of the art secure DNSSEC.
I mean, if your definition of "affordable" is free, then sure.
But for the record there are other affordable EU suppliers who do DNSSEC:
- Bunny DNS[0] is "free" – i.e. only subject to their minimum $1/month account spend fee.
- RcodeZero is very affordable[1] plus added bonus it is run by the `.at` registry so the infrastructure is solid – business customers only, no private individuals
- Netnod (only via resellers[2] unless you are a big company or government) – Netnod host the I Root Servers and their public hosting DNSSEC service will soon feature HSM-bound DNSSEC keys
I happen to run an affordable EU supplier who does DNSSEC, and also AXFR (incoming and outgoing). I offer a free plan from time to time, but not at the moment to preserve resources for paying customer.
I have been using deSEC for a couple of years without any issues. I mostly just do not want my DNS handled by my registrar so that I can easily transfer domains without worrying about DNS as well, and I do not like how centralized the internet is becoming around Cloudflare.
After recent US shenanigans why would you spend effort to migrate to yet another Five Eyes controlled service, especially if they do the full "privacy from Germany" circus.
What kind of security threat does a migration to such a service actually mitigate?
If they were truly a "sovereign EU" kind of project then they'd be on .eu domain, not have security advisors from Virginia, and so on.
Nevertheless it's good to see that the decoupling-from-your-allies movement that US citizens have initiated is so scary that they have to set up these kind of fake EU alternatives with some local figureheads.
My solution was to self-host PowerDNS and then sign up for the free DNS mirroring from hurricane electric. That way, I can administer my DNS records any way I want (these days I usually just manually edit PowerDNS's sqlite database) and if/when my PowerDNS server goes down, hurricane electric is still serving my records so the domain keeps resolving fine.
Unbound is caching, not authoritative. Zones with dns records are served from authoritative DNS servers such as bind. Unbound asks authoritative servers for records and caches them locally, giving faster response and reducing load on authoritative servers.
So I did. No silly miniscule restrictions.
> […] our mission is to improve Internet security by increasing the adoption of DNSSEC. [We therefore expect users to enable DNSSEC for their domains.
> Would you be willing to do that?
Wanting to increase the adoption of DNSSEC is fair, but couldn’t this be all self-serve? It’s almost as if they don’t want people to use them.
As an aside (though this certainly applies to deSEC) it's strange to me how so many DNS services (free or paid) struggle to import simple Bind zone files, often either giving a vague error ("one or more records could not be imported"), mangling records, or even just silently omitting records. Parsing a zone file has some gotchas, but it doesn't seem like it should be that hard.
https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/
I mean, if your definition of "affordable" is free, then sure.
But for the record there are other affordable EU suppliers who do DNSSEC:
[0] https://bunny.net/dns/ [1] https://www.rcodezero.at/solutions/enterprise [2] https://www.netnod.se/dns/find-a-partnerhttps://www.ptrdns.net/
Looks like it's the glue records that point to the actual server?
What kind of security threat does a migration to such a service actually mitigate?
If they were truly a "sovereign EU" kind of project then they'd be on .eu domain, not have security advisors from Virginia, and so on.
Nevertheless it's good to see that the decoupling-from-your-allies movement that US citizens have initiated is so scary that they have to set up these kind of fake EU alternatives with some local figureheads.
It looks like they are open to adding the feature and open to outside contributions: https://github.com/desec-io/desec-stack/issues/579