Network Automation and AI at NANOG 93

I recently attended NANOG 93, in Atlanta in the first week of February (https://nanog.org/events/nanog-93/agenda/). The dominant theme of the presentations this time around was the combination of automation of network command and control and the application of Artificial Intelligence tools to this control function. The interest in AI appears to…


DNS Nameservers: Service Platforms and Resilience

Last year, in December, I looked at the behaviour of DNS recursive resolvers from the perspective of optimising performance and resilience of name resolution (). When given a choice of nameservers to use to query for a particular name within a domain will the resolver try to make an “optimal”…


A Transport Protocol’s View of Starlink

Digital communications systems always represent a collection of design trade-offs. Maximising one characteristic of a system may impair others, and various communications services may chose to optimise different performance parameters based on the intersection these design decisions with the physical characteristics of the communications medium. In this article I’ll look…


DNSSEC and .nz

I had the opportunity to participate in the New Zealand Network Operators Group meeting (NZNOG) in Nelson earlier this month. This article was prompted by a presentation from Josh Simpson on an .nz service outage incident in May 2023. I guess we’ve become used to reading evasive and vague outage…


DNS OARC 42

–> The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) brings together DNS service operators, DNS software implementors, and researchers together to share concerns, information and learn together about the operation and evolution of the DNS. They meet between two to three times a year in a workshops format. The most…


BGP in 2023 – BGP Updates

The first part of this annual report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the…


BGP in 2023 – Have we reached Peak IPv4?

At the start of each year, I’ve been reporting on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.…


How We Measure: DNSSEC Validation

At APNIC Labs we publish a number of measurements of the deployment of various technologies that are being adopted on the Internet. Here we will look at how we measure the adoption of DNSSEC validation. DNSSEC Security for the DNS has been a vexed topic for many years. The days…


Notes from NANOG 89: BGP Error Handling

The original specification of the BGP routing protocol, RFC 1105, from 1989, has the following directive: “NOTIFICATION messages are sent when an error condition is detected. The BGP connection is closed shortly after sending the notification message.” Ahh, you might think, that might be a potential problem, but the directive…