Doing DNS better: DNS (and BIND) Training with Men&Mice

DNS is the core mechanism of the internet. And, as all technology does, it keeps evolving and changing, even if its primary function hasn’t changed all that much. DNS makes networks work, but in turn we have to make DNS work.

Because it’s so critically important to networks, DNS is also a prime target for attack. With the Internet-of-Things bringing online hundreds of thousands of devices every hour (!) of every day, the attack vectors for malicious elements are multiplying exponentially. And beyond DDoS striking fear in every network manager’s heart, the most constant threat to any network still remains the most basic one: easy-to-miss configuration errors.

Safeguards from smart vendors (like our own xDNS Redundancy™) help protect against DNS errors and DNS attacks such as DDoS. Training your staff protects against human error. Learning how to configure, manage, and defend DNS effectively yields both obvious and unexpected benefits to any business’s network. If you want to keep your critical business infrastructure running smoothly,  your network staff needs to be able to grasp DNS from every angle.

That’s where we come in.

Learn DNS with Men&Mice

Men&Mice has been offering DNS training for 20 years, since 1999. Our training program has educated students throughout the birth and boom of the internet. We’ve played a critical role in strategy and management of network growth all along.

Having a comprehensive training program that allows entry for any knowledge level is instrumental, as we know students seek out our courses with various objectives in mind. Courses are designed to provide both a renewed examination of existing knowledge, with new best practices, to expert students as well as  fundamental, practical information for beginners.

A new and improved courses - for everyone

How we teach DNS is constantly evolving, in sync with innovations in DNS technology. For example, our courses have been augmented with new security and monitoring materials, new sections on RPZ, RRL, DNS Cookies and dnstap. All these sections include laboratory exercises for hands-on experience.  Other brand new material covers minimal ANY, DNS looking glasses, and packet capture (passive replication). We have added additional quizzes and several new labs, such as challenging debugging labs.

So which course is a perfect fit for you?

If you’re new to DNS, we recommend the DNS & BIND Fundamentals (DNSB-F) program. It’s part of the DNS & BIND Week (DNSB-W) and serves as a shorter introduction to the world of DNS and BIND.

If you’re already familiar with the basics, the full five-day DNS & BIND Week (DNSB-W) course takes you deeper into DNS, including  a heavy emphasis on security, stopping just short of DNSSEC (for which we offer a separate course).

For those looking for even more, we offer the DNS & BIND Advanced (DNSB-A) program. The DNSB-A gets into the full depths of DNS and BIND with topics such as

• new ISC binary releases for Linux distributions that were added last summer,
• the change to dnssec-keygen beginning in BIND 9.13,
• catalog zones,
• packet capture (passive replication),
• and more.

And for those of you curious about whether the BIND training addresses the most recent versions of BIND: Both DNS & BIND Fundamentals (DNSB-F) and DNS & BIND Week (DNSB-W), as well as the DNS & BIND Advanced (DNSB-A) course have not only been updated to 9.11, but also addresses changes in 9.12 and 9.13.

DNS training for the real world

Our instructors and program coordinators value comprehensive, practical teaching methods. As such, our course materials are decidedly not "animated user manuals" - they cover DNS contextually, with real-world examples and hands-on labs. As one of our recent students put it:

“I was very impressed with everything about Men&Mice. The communication, the facilities, the instructor, the material. Everything about my class was really awesome, knowledgeable, and engaging. They never let us just sit there, always brought us into the lesson, and also gave great examples to help us understand concepts. I would take any class they taught.” (Michelle Boyd, Systems Engineer, Southwest Airlines)

Upcoming course dates include courses offered near Denver, Colorado in April, as well as Gdansk, Poland and Reston, Virgina, in June. We're also adding courses for Fall 2019 across North America (US, Canada), Ireland, The Netherlands and Switzerland. Stay tuned for more details.  To learn more about the Men&Mice Training Program and see what’s available in your neck of the woods, visit https://menandmice.com/training.