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The story of computing and communications over the past eighty years has been a story of quite astounding improvements in the capability, cost and efficiency of computers and communications. If the same efficiency improvements had been made in the automobile industry cars would cost a couple of dollars, would cost…
When the Internet outgrew its academic and research roots and gained some prominence and momentum in the broader telecommunications environment its proponents found themselves to be in opposition to many of the established practices of the international telecommunications arrangements and even in opposition to the principles that lie behind these…
One of the more active areas of activity at the IETF falls under the remit of the DNS Operations Working Group. It’s an operational Working Group rather than a protocol development working group, but nevertheless the DNS is a very rich topic area with much to talk about. There is…
The Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) is a remarkably simple system. You send queries into this system via a call to your local host’s name resolution library, and you get back answers. If you peek into the DNS system you’ll see exactly the same simplicity: The DNS resolver that receives…
The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) brings together DNS service operators, DNS software implementors, and researchers together to share concerns, information and learn together about the operation and evolution of the DNS. They meet between two to three times a year in a workshops format. The most recent…
I recently attended NANOG 93, in Atlanta in the first week of February (https://nanog.org/events/nanog-93/agenda/). The dominant theme of the presentations this time around was the combination of automation of network command and control and the application of Artificial Intelligence tools to this control function. The interest in AI appears to…
The internet is held together by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). It’s an “interesting” protocol in many ways. Each BGP speaker uses a reliable transport protocol to send local reachability information to its adjacent peers. The inference is once a BGP neighbour has been informed about a new item, whether…
Last year, in December, I looked at the behaviour of DNS recursive resolvers from the perspective of optimising performance and resilience of name resolution (). When given a choice of nameservers to use to query for a particular name within a domain will the resolver try to make an “optimal”…
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992 the IETF gazed…
The first part of this annual report on BGP for the year 2024 looked at the size of the routing table and some projections of table growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of…
