DNS is the new BGP

AUSNOG’23 was held in September. As usual, the meeting had a diverse collection of presentations on network technology, operational practices, engineering, and experiences. One of these presentations, by Cloudflare’s Tom Peseka, was on the subject of service routing, highlighting the ways in which today’s service platform attempt to optimise the…


Measuring the Use of DNSSEC

The canonical specification of the DNS that is normally cited are the pair of quite venerable RFCs, RFC 1034, “Domain names – concepts and facilities”, and RFC 1035, “Domain names – implementation and specification”, both published in November 1987. However, these two specification documents are just the tip of a…


DNSOP at IETF117

This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the recordings of the sessions, see the IETF 117 meeting archive. After the flurry of work in various…


IEPG at IETF 117

This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the comments at the mic see the IETF 117 meeting archive. The IEPG meets for a couple of…


Chipping Away

This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the comments at the mic see the IETF 117 meeting archive. The ACM/IRTF Applied Network Research Workshop is…


On Centrality and Fragmentation

I attended a workshop on the topic of Internet Fragmentation in July. The workshop was attended by a small collection of Australian public policy folk, some industry representatives, folk from various cyber-related bodies and those who have a background in Internet Governance matters. It was a short meeting, so the…


NXDOMAIN

The DNS is a strange and at times surprising environment. One could take a simple perspective and claim that the aim of the DNS is to translate DNS names into IP addresses. And you wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s also so much more. The DNS is also used as a…


Happy 50th Birthday Ethernet!

Some 50 years ago, at the Palo Alto Research Centre of that renowned photocopier company Xerox, a revolutionary approach to local digital networks was born. On the 22nd of May 1973 Bob Metcalf authored a memo that described “X-Wire”, a 3Mbps common bus office network system developed at Xerox’s Palo…


A Further Update on IPv6 Extension Headers

Following the publication of RFC 7872 in 2016, a number of research teams have been looking at the nature of network and host behaviours in discarding IPv6 packets with various Extension Headers (EH). The findings reported in RFC 7872 were a significant level of packet loss (“significant” being above 10%…


RIPE 86 Bites – Encryption and Active Network Management

RIPE held a community meeting in May in Rotterdam. There were a number of presentations that sparked my interest, but rather than write my impressions in a single lengthy note, I thought I would just take a couple of topics and use a shorter, and hopefully more readable bite-sized format.…