Using LEOs and GEOs

Once you head away from the areas that are serviced by modern terrestrial cable infrastructure, the available digital communications options are somewhat limited. Some remote areas are served using High Frequency radio systems, using radio signals that bounce off the ionosphere to provide a long distance, but limited bandwidth, service.…


Hop by Hop

It is a rare situation when you can create an outcome from two somewhat broken technologies where the outcome is not also broken. Unless each of the components can precisely complement each other such that a weakness in one can be covered by a strength in the other, then the…


AUSNOG ’21

ISP Column – April 2022 AUSNOG was held in September 2021 December 2021 April 2022 in Sydney over two days. Here are a few notes from presentations at the meeting that I found interesting. Automating Network Management Network management was never the “sexy” part of the Internet. For decades network…


IETF 113 – IEPG Meeting

The IETF met in a hybrid format in March 2022. Here are my impressions from the IEPG meeting at the start of the week. The IEPG meets on the Sunday at the start of the IETF week. If there is a theme for the diverse collection of presentations here it…


IETF 113 – DNS Topics

The IETF met in a hybrid format in March 2022. Here are my impressions from the DNS-related Working Group sessions during the week. Handling Negative Caching of DNS Resolution Failure It has been a feature of the DNS that whenever there is a failure in serving DNS data, the query…


Revocation

Two years ago, I wrote an article on X.509 certificate revocation. I’d like to report that a lot has happened between then and now, but that’s not the case. So why revisit this topic today? What drew my attention was a tweet earlier this month that reported that the Certification…


DNS-OARC 37

There was a meeting of DNS Operations and Research group in February, DNS-OARC 37. These are my notes from the presentations that I found to be of interest. Zone File Bug Hunting The DNS is deceptively simple. Simple, in that are few choices in how to configure the zone information…


Another Year of the Transition to IPv6

I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later we’d still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4 and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry…


DNS4EU

The last few decades have not been a story of unqualified success for European technology enterprises. The European industrial giants of the old telephone world, such as the former stalwarts Alcatel, Siemens, Philips, Ericsson and Nokia, have found it to be extraordinarily difficult to translate their former dominant positions in…


What’s an “Address”?

I work at APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry that serves the Asia Pacific Region. APNIC provides common infrastructure services for the region that support the unique assignment of IP address blocks to Internet network operators within our region through the operation of an address registry. In short, IP addresses are…