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deSEC Nameserver

This is a docker-compose application to run a nameserver. Zone data is automatically provided to this application via database replication. The application consists of

  • ns: Actual DNS server.
  • replicator: Python container running a replication loop.
  • openvpn-client: OpenVPN client container providing network services for ns and replicator.

Requirements

Although most configuration is contained in this repository, some external dependencies need to be met before the application can be run. Dependencies are:

  1. We run this software with the --userland-proxy=false flag of the dockerd daemon, and recommend you do the same.

  2. Set sensitive information and network topology using environment variables or an .env file. You need (you can use the env file as a template):

    • network
      • DESEC_NS_IPV6_SUBNET: IPv6 net, ideally /80
      • DESEC_NS_IPV6_ADDRESS: IPv6 address of frontend container
    • ns-related
      • DESEC_NS_APIKEY: ns API key needed for replication operations
      • DESEC_NS_CARBONSERVER: pdns carbon-server setting (optional)
      • DESEC_NS_CARBONOURNAME: pdns carbon-ourname setting (optional)
      • DESEC_NS_NAME: name under which this name server will be reached, e.g. ns1.example.com (optional unless DESEC_NS_SIGNALING_DOMAIN_ZONE_PRIVATE_KEY_B64 is defined, see below)
    • primary-related
      • DESECSTACK_VPN_SERVER: VPN server hostname

  3. Set up secrets for the VPN: Before setting up a deSEC nameserver, you will have to deploy the deSEC main stack so that the nameserver can connect to it in order to fetch DNS data. In the process of setting up the stack deployment, you will have created a PKI, for example using easy-rsa and this tutorial. Use this PKI now in order to create a new client.key and client.crt pair, and transfer these file securely to the nameserver, along with ca.crt and ta.key from the main stack deployment, and copy them into openvpn-client/secrets/. (You can also create client.key locally on the nameserver application and transfer a certificate signing request to the host at which your PKI is located.)

  4. (Optional) To set up DNSSEC Bootstrapping, a key for signing the zone in which the Signaling Domain is hosted. The private key must be provided in DESEC_NS_SIGNALING_DOMAIN_ZONE_PRIVATE_KEY_B64 in a format compatible with pdnsutil import-zone-key, but encoded in base64. One way of obtaining such a key is by using pdnsutil:

    pdnsutil generate-zone-key ksk ecdsa256 | grep -E 'Private-key-format:|Algorithm:|PrivateKey:' | base64 | tr -d '\n'

    If using DNSSEC Bootstrapping, the DESEC_NS_SIGNALING_DOMAIN_SOA_MNAME, DESEC_NS_SIGNALING_DOMAIN_SOA_RNAME environment variables should be provided for the Signaling Domain zone SOA record.

How to Run

$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose up

This fires up the various services, connects to the VPN, starts replicating from the master, and fires up the nameserver.

LMDB Database Backups

Create backup

Given a nameserver of any freshness (may be up to date or stale or empty), do the following:

  1. Make sure the docker-compose application is not running.
  2. Run ./dump.sh. This fires up ns and replicator to perform a sync, waits until nothing is left to do, and then shuts everything down. Next, the script starts a lmdb-backup container which contains a manually built version of lmdb tooling, runs mdb_dump to export the database, creates a tar.gz file with everything, and puts it into ./lmdb-backup/backup/.

Caveat: Running such a dump nameserver on the stack host fails because that requires an OpenVPN client and server on the same machine, which does not work. In other words, the dump has to run somewhere else. This may be an OpenVPN limitation, so there may not even be a fix.

Restore Backup

Take a backup file created in the previous step and store it at ./lmdb-backup/backup/.

  1. Run ./load.sh $FILENAME, where $FILENAME is the name of one of the files in ./lmdb-backup/backup/. This starts a lmdb-backup container, extracts the file in it, runs mdb_load, and puts all files into the PowerDNS storage directory. The script aborts if that directory is not empty.
  2. Start nameserver normally to resume regular operation, including replication.

Notes on Networking

  • It is not necessary to start the Docker daemon with --ipv6 or --fixed-cidr-v6. However, it is recommended to run dockerd with --userland-proxy=false to avoid exposing ports on the host IPv6 address through docker-proxy.

  • This stack is IPv6-capable. To prevent evil people from abusing this app for DNS amplification attacks, it is highly recommended to rate limit requests by IP (or take some smarter precaution). In particular, consider using he nameserver's policy settings, or the iptables hashlimit module.

    When using iptables, note that whenever you restart the docker daemon or this application (docker-compose down; docker-compose up), docker will insert its own rules at the top of the chain. You therefore have to make sure that these rules get re-applied whenever docker decides to jump the queue. See this issue for details and progress on this.