Rootconf 2025 Annual Conference CfP

{Describe your talk/session in 2–3 paragraphs}

DNS lookups are fundamental to how systems communicate, yet they’re often treated as a black box , until something breaks. In this session, I’ll walk through how DNS resolution actually works in a typical Linux environment. Starting from local mechanisms like /etc/hosts, and moving through configuration files like resolv.conf and nsswitch.conf, I’ll explain how the system resolver orchestrates DNS queries. I’ll also demonstrate how tools like dig, strace, and tcpdump can be used to troubleshoot DNS failures and latency issues in real-time techniques that have helped me diagnose elusive problems in production environments.

The session then shifts to DNS inside Kubernetes, where things get more dynamic. I’ll unpack how CoreDNS works as the cluster’s DNS engine, how it interacts with the Kubernetes API for service discovery, and how pods resolve internal DNS names like my-service.default.svc.cluster.local. I’ll also cover DNS search paths, stub domains, and common pitfalls that impact service resolution and performance inside clusters. Along the way, I’ll share real-world scenarios, misconfigurations I’ve encountered, and debugging techniques that go beyond just running kubectl exec.

{1–2 Takeaways from your session}

Gain a clear understanding of how DNS resolution works under the hood in both Linux and Kubernetes environments.

Learn practical debugging workflows using standard tools to diagnose and fix DNS-related issues efficiently.

{Which audience segment is your talk/session going to be beneficial for?}

This session is best suited for DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), platform engineers, and backend developers—particularly those working with containerized or cloud-native environments and responsible for infrastructure or networking reliability.

{Add your bio – what you do; where you work}

I’m Anirudh Saksena, a 3rd-year Integrated Computer Applications student passionate about systems, networking, and cloud technologies. I enjoy digging into how infrastructure works behind the scenes and building tools or workflows that make complex problems easier to understand and solve.