[sigcomm] DNS in the Wild: Your help is needed!

[Steve Uhlig]

Dear member of the SIGCOMM community,

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a fundamental building block of today's
Internet. DNS is involved whenever you access a website, read your e- 
mails,
download a file, etc. We aim to understand how DNS works in the wild,  
i.e., as
experienced by end users. First results of our research have been  
recently
published at ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in
Melbourne, Australia:

http://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2010/papers/p15.pdf

To better understand DNS and its performance, we would like to scale  
up the
experiments and for this we are seeking your help. If you are willing to
participate in this effort, please go to the following link:

http://www.fg-inet.de

Download the script that can be found in the download section of the  
website,
and run it from an Internet connection provided by a commercial ISP,  
e.g., at
home.

The typical duration of the experiment is around six hours. All major  
operating
systems are supported (Linux, Mac OS, Windows etc.). Once the  
experiment is
done, please upload the traces on our website:

http://www.fg-inet.de/upload.php

Our script performs DNS queries for a number of predefined hosts.  
This list is
included in plain text in the download packages. The traces collected  
with our
program do not interact with any of your browsing or download history or
activity. The additional bandwidth consumption and CPU load due to the
experiment are negligible. The traces collected on this website will  
be kept
confidential within the project and will not be distributed to any  
third party,
nor shared with any third party.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you face any problems in  
downloading or
running the program.


Thank you for your participation,

Bernhard Ager, Wolfgang Muehlbauer, Georgios Smaragdakis, Steve Uhlig.
email: dnstraces at net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de