changing dns to 4096 in ASA

[mahesh18]

Hi everyone.

In ASA 5550 if I change the DNS from 512 to 4096 will it cause any outage?

policy-map type inspect dns preset_dns_map
 parameters

  message-length maximum 4096
 

Regards

MAhesh

[rvarelac · Accepted solution]

Hi Mahesh , 

According to the DNS and DDNS best practices                                                                                      "

Inspection of Large DNS packets through Firewalls or Application Layer Gateways

Devices that perform Application Layer Inspection (ALI) may reject large (greater than 512 bytes) DNS packets.  Cisco ASA and PIX firewall products running pre-8.3 code versions that are configured with the default DNS inspection policy will only permit DNS packets up to 512 bytes. This message-length limit may not be large enough for an organization's internal clients, or for servers advertising that they want to receive and validate DNSSEC resource records. Based on internal testing performed by Cisco Security Research & Operations (SRO), we recommend using a message length size of 4096 bytes. No legitimate DNSSEC packets should be larger than 4096 bytes"

This change on the firewall should not cause any impact to the DNS pass-through traffic , however as any change you made on the firewall is recommended to setup a maintenance window or test environment prior to test.

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/security/intelligence/dnssec.html

Hope it helps

-Randy-

[mahesh18]

Many thanks Randy !

[pravintheprofessional]

May be it can cause an Buffer memory(RAM) outage because you are using Maximam size of 4096 , syntactically its correct but i didn't think it will suit for the hardware configurations may be it can affect other functionalities of the ASA , You can use the following command which will configure the DNS message size according to the client,

"message-length maximum client auto"

Praveen Kumar Balasundaram

Spooster IT Services