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We tend to make a number of assumptions about the Internet, and sometimes these assumptions don’t always stand up to critical analysis. We were perhaps ‘trained’ by the claims of the telephone service to believe that these communicaitons networks supported a model of universal connectivity. Any telephone handset could establish…
This is the long version of the blog post. A shorter version is available here. There is a graph I’ve been pondering for some time that illustrates the topic I’d like to look at in this article. Figure 1 – Number of Routes announced…
The Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, has been holding the Internet together, for more than two decades and nothing seems to be falling off the edge so far. As far as we can tell everyone can still see everyone else, assuming that they want to be seen, and the distributed…
One of the more difficult design exercises in packet switched network architectures is that of the design of packet fragmentation. In this article I’d like to examine IP packet fragmentation in detail and look at the design choices made by IP version 4, and then compare that with the design…
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. What happened in 2015 and what is likely to happen in 2016? This is an update to the reports prepared at the same time in previous years, so let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in…
What’s in a name? that which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet;Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II What’s the difference between .local and .here? Or between .onion and .apple? All four of these labels are capable of being represented in the Internet’s Domain Name…
The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days so this is by no means all that was presented through…
Every so often I hear the claim that some service or other does not support IPv6 not because of some technical issue, or some cost or business issue, but simply because the service operator is of the view that IPv6 offers an inferior level service as compared to IPv4, and…
One of the early refinements in the Internet protocol model was the splitting of the original Internet protocol from a single monolithic specification [1] into the Internet Protocol (IP) and a pair of transport protocols. The Internet Protocol layer is intended to be used by the internal switches within the…
I attended the ARIN 36 meeting that was held in Montreal in October, immediately following NANOG 65. The logistics of the meeting were up to ARIN’s high standards: the agenda, the discussion guides, the information provided to attendees was well executed, as usual. The agenda included a number of policy…
