38C3 Community Stages

we made a globally distributed DNS network for shits and giggles
2024-12-29 , Stage HUFF
Language: English

DNS infrastructure is a bespoke pile of interconnected "standards", and its management is often treated as an afterthought. With Project SERVFAIL we aim to change that perception, providing both general docs and a community-run alternative to commercial nameservers - all of which while staying exceedingly silly.


What started as a joke shitpost on fedi ended up with us spending multiple weeks hacking on everything DNS: from infra setups, through automating DNSSEC deployments, up to writing a fully custom zone edit website.

With Project SERVFAIL, we set out to discover what we could do better than the status quo. With barely any progress in the past 15 years, the NS provider field has seemingly stagnated. We set out to change that - and while SERVFAIL is still a Work in Progress, we're already at a point where we have a lot to share: stories of horror, upstream negligence, but also of hope and wonder for the future.

All of this while still bringing a vibe that wouldn't let you mistake us for for an enterprise - and for free, OSS, of course.

scared of you more than you think
interests: reverse engineering, networks, osdev and olde shite

you probably know me from writing a minecraft server in bash

I do everything with networking (the packet switched type), other internet standards and the occasional hardware project to build or reverse engineer something.

The human incarnation of the term chaos engineering. German. Ex-TUDO. Server-toucher. Banking IT. Pro-🏳️‍🌈. Pro-🏳️‍⚧️.