IETF 98 Report

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 Working Group sessions that are relevant and interesting to them. I do much the same when I attend IETF meetings.…


NANOG 69

NANOG 69 was held in Washington DC in early February. Here’s my notes from the meeting. It would not be Washington without a keynote opening talk about the broader political landscape and NANOG certainly ticked this box with a talk on international politics and cyberspace. I did learn a new…


A Postscript to the Leap Second

The inexorable progress of time clocked past the New Year and at 23:59:60 on the 31st December 2016 UTC the leap second claimed another victim. This time Cloudflare described how the Leap Second caused some DNS failures in Cloudflare’s infrastructure. What is going on here? It should not have been…


Leaving it to the Last Second

Thanks to the moon, the earth’s rate of rotation is slowing down. It’s a subtle interaction and the modelling of planetary dynamics predicts that the earth’s rotation should slowing down by an average of 2.3 milliseconds per century. But this is not quite so uniform, as the Economist reported in…


RIPE 73

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…


BGP Large Communities

IPv4 addresses are not the only Internet number resource that has effectively run out in recent times. Another pool of Internet numbers under similar consumption pressures has been the numbers that are intended to uniquely identify each network in the Internet’s inter-domain routing space. These are Autonomous System numbers (ASNs).…


NANOG 68

NANOG held its 68th meeting in Dallas in October. Here’s what I found memorable and/or noteworthy from this meeting. The meeting opened with Scott Bradner and a history of the IANA. Given that the arrangements with the US Government exercising some level of oversight on the IANA function lapsed on…


Labs retires the old ipv6-measurement graphs

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…


Hosts vs Networks

There are a number of ways to view the relationship between hosts and the network in the Internet. One view is that this is an example of two sets of cooperating entities that share a common goal: hosts and the network both want content to be delivered. Both have an…


Leaping Seconds

Time, as measured according to the Earth’s rotation, is getting slower. If we want 86,400 seconds to measure precisely one rotation of the earth on its axis then over time each second will get longer. Instead, we define a second as a fixed unit of time based on atomic vibrations…