DNSSEC Validation (Revisited)

One year ago, I looked at the state of adoption of DNSSEC validation in DNS resolvers and the answer was not unreservedly optimistic. Instead of the “up and to the right” curves that show a momentum of adoption, there was a pronounced slowing down across 2017 and the first half…


Deep Sea Diving

Last month I attended the New Zealand Network Operators’ Group meeting (NZNOG’20). One of the more interesting talks for me was given by Cisco’s Beatty Lane-Davis on the current state of subsea cable technology. There is something quite compelling about engineering a piece of state-of-the-art technology that is intended to…


Addressing 2019

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…


BGP in 2019 – Part 2

The first part of this report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its 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 prefixes carried in the routing…


BGP in 2019 – Part 1

It has become a tradition (or quite possibly a habit) each January for me to report on the behaviour of the inter-domain routing system over the past year, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying…


Sizing the Buffer

Packet switched networks benefit from buffers within the network’s switches. In the simplest case, if two packets arrive at a switch at the same time and are destined to the same output port, then one packet will need to wait in a buffer while the other packet is sent on,…


My IETF 106

The 106th meeting of the IETF was in Singapore in November 2019. As usual for the IETF, there were many Working Group meetings, and this report is definitely not an attempt to cover all of these meetings or even anything close to that. Here I’ve been highly selective and picked…


Notes from OARC 31

DNS OARC held its 31st meeting in Austin, Texas on 31 October to 1 November. Here are some of my highlights from two full days of DNS presentations at this workshop. Building a New Nameserver There are two parts to DNS infrastructure. One is the infrastructure that supports resolving queries…


DNS Wars

NANOG is now quite an institution in the Internet, particularly in the North American Internet community. It was an offshoot of the Regional Techs meetings, which were part of the NSFNET framework of the late 80s and early 90s. NANOG has thrived since then and is certainly one of the…


Path Prepending in BGP

In this article I’d like to look at one particular aspect of the Internet’s inter-domain routing framework, namely the role of the Autonomous System (AS) Path in the operation of BGP, and in particular the use of AS Prepending. What is an Autonomous System? To introduce this topic a brief…