Addressing 2017

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. There is no doubt that the…


BGP in 2017

It has become either a tradition, or a habit, each January for me to report on the experience with 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 interconnection…


A Workshop on Internet Economics

In the United States the debate between advocates of market-based resolution of competitive tensions and regulatory intervention has seldom reached the fever pitch that we’ve seen over the vexed on-again off-again question of Net Neutrality in recent weeks. It seems as it the process of determination of communications policy has…


Network Neutrality – Again

It strikes me as odd to see a developed and, by any reasonable standard, a prosperous economy getting into so much trouble with its public communications policy framework. I’m sure that this comment could apply to many countries, including Australia with their political football called the National Broadband Network. But…


Helping Resolvers to help the DNS

In this final article of a trio that looks at today’s “hot” topics in the DNS, I’d like to look at ways that recursive resolvers in the DNS can take some further steps that assist other parts of the DNS, notably the set of authoritative name servers, including root zone…


Hiding the DNS

Among all the working groups that met at IETF 100 in Singapore was the first meeting of the DNS over HTTPs Working Group (DOH). I wrote on a related topic of DNS Privacy a little over a year ago, looking at the work at the time on the privacy-related topics…


DNS and DDOS

The Mirai DDOS attack happened just over a year ago, on the 21st October 2016. The attack was certainly a major landmark in terms of the sorry history of “landmark” DDOS attacks in the Internet. It’s up there with the Morris Worm of 1988, Slammer of 2002, Sapphine/Slammer of 2009…


Thanks Google!

When writing this blog I am never sure who reads it and how they take it. Back in August I wrote up an examination of the behaviour of IPv6 and packet fragmentation with an observation relating to Google’s Public DNS Service. I used two example cases of queries for Google’s…


Ripe 75

RIPE held its 75th meeting in Dubai in mid-October. As usual there was a diverse set of presentations covering a broad range of activities that are taking place on today’s Internet. The topics include issues relating to network operations, regulatory policies, peering and interconnection, communications practices within data centres, IPv6,…


Raw Sockets in IPv6

Among many other functions performed by a computer’s operating system, there is typically an interface to a shared local network protocol engine. This means that applications that run within the operating system’s environment don’t need to implement their own network protocol engine, as they can make use of a shared…