Notes from NANOG 89: BGP Error Handling

The original specification of the BGP routing protocol, RFC 1105, from 1989, has the following directive: “NOTIFICATION messages are sent when an error condition is detected. The BGP connection is closed shortly after sending the notification message.” Ahh, you might think, that might be a potential problem, but the directive…


Internet Governance in 2023

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me in mid-October 2023. I presented in a couple of panels at the 18th Internet Governance Forum meeting, held in Kyoto, Japan, and I also listened in to a couple of sessions in their packed agenda. The following week I followed the…


Notes from OARC 41

OARC held a 2-day meeting in September in Danang, Vietnam, with a set of presentations on various DNS topics. Here’s some observations that I picked up from the presentations that were made that meeting. Deploying ZONEMD in the Root Zone As a distributed database, the DNS works through the piecemeal…


DNS is the new BGP

AUSNOG’23 was held in September. As usual, the meeting had a diverse collection of presentations on network technology, operational practices, engineering, and experiences. One of these presentations, by Cloudflare’s Tom Peseka, was on the subject of service routing, highlighting the ways in which today’s service platform attempt to optimise the…


Measuring the Use of DNSSEC

The canonical specification of the DNS that is normally cited are the pair of quite venerable RFCs, RFC 1034, “Domain names – concepts and facilities”, and RFC 1035, “Domain names – implementation and specification”, both published in November 1987. However, these two specification documents are just the tip of a…


DNSOP at IETF117

This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the recordings of the sessions, see the IETF 117 meeting archive. After the flurry of work in various…


IEPG at IETF 117

This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the comments at the mic see the IETF 117 meeting archive. The IEPG meets for a couple of…


Chipping Away

This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the comments at the mic see the IETF 117 meeting archive. The ACM/IRTF Applied Network Research Workshop is…


On Centrality and Fragmentation

I attended a workshop on the topic of Internet Fragmentation in July. The workshop was attended by a small collection of Australian public policy folk, some industry representatives, folk from various cyber-related bodies and those who have a background in Internet Governance matters. It was a short meeting, so the…


NXDOMAIN

The DNS is a strange and at times surprising environment. One could take a simple perspective and claim that the aim of the DNS is to translate DNS names into IP addresses. And you wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s also so much more. The DNS is also used as a…