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RIPE held its 73rd meeting in Madrid in the last week of October. Here are a few of my takeaways from that meeting. What’s behind all those NATs? We suspect that there are at least 10 billion devices connected to today’s Internet, and we know that less than two billion…
I was struck at a recent NANOG meeting just how few presentations looked at the ISP space and the issues relating to ISP operations and how many were looking at the data centre environment. If the topics that we use to talk to each other are any guide, then this…
As the stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6 code has reached a stable service, we’ve decided to retire the old labs.apnic.net/ipv6-measurement/ tree of graphs. For people with saved URLs, it should redirect to the new service, and should map an ASN or Economy to the right dataset. For people who are farming the site for…
The IETF meetings are relatively packed events lasting over a week, and it’s just not possible to attend every session. Inevitably each attendee follows their own interests and participates in sessions that are relevant and interesting to them. I do much the same when I attend IETF meetings, and from…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a core protocol of the Internet networking protocol suite. This protocol transforms the underlying unreliable datagram delivery service provided by the IP protocol into a reliable data stream protocol. This protocol was undoubtedly the single greatest transformative moment in the evolution of computer networks.…
Back at the end of June 2012[0] there was a brief IT hiccup as the world adjusted the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard by adding an extra second to the last minute of the 31st of June. Normally such an adjustment would pass unnoticed by all but a small dedicated…
