Declaring IPv6 an “Internet Standard”

I’ve already shared my thoughts following a session of the IPv4 Sunset Working Group at IETF 95 that considered whether to declare IPv4 an “Historic” specification. Of course, as one would expect for a meeting of a Standards Development Organization (SDO), that wasn’t the only standards process discussion through the…


IPv6 and the Internet of Things

It has often been claimed that IPv6 and the Internet of Things are strongly aligned, to the extent that claims are made they are mutually reliant. An Internet of Things needs the massively expanded protocol address space that only IPv6 can provide, while IPv6 needs to identify a compelling use…


Declaring IPv4 “Historic”

At the IETF 95 meeting at the start of April I was in a meeting of the IPv4 Sunset Working Group, and heard Lee Howard present on a proposal that recommended that IP version 4, or to be specific, that the technical protocol specification documented in RFC 791, be declared…


DNS OARC 24

DNS OARC held a two day workshop in Buenos Aires prior to IETF 95 at the end of March 2016. Here are my impressions of this meeting. For a supposedly simply query response protocol that maps names to IP addresses there a huge amount going on under the hood with…


Rolling Roots

In the world of public key cryptography, it is often observed that no private key can be a kept as an absolute secret forever. This does not mean that a private key remains a secret for a limited time and then the underlying cryptography spontaneously breaks apart and the key…


DNS Zombies

It seems that some things just never die, and this includes DNS queries. In a five month experiment encompassing the detailed analysis of some 44 billion DNS queries we find that one quarter of these DNS queries are zombies – queries that have no current user awaiting the response, and…


NANOG 66

NANOG continues to be one of the major gatherings on network operators and admins, together with the folk who work to meet the various needs of this community. Their program committee produces a program that never fails to provide thought provoking interest. Here are my reactions to some of the…


BGP in 2015

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…