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).…


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…


NANOG 65 Report

NANOG 65 was once again your typical NANOG meeting: a set of operators, vendors, researchers and others for 3 days, this time in Montreal in October. Here’s my impressions of the meeting. Keynote The opening keynote was from Jack Waters from Level 3, which looked back over the past 25…


More Leaky Routes

Most of the time, mostly everywhere, most of the Internet appears to work just fine. Indeed, it seems to work just fine enough to the point that that when it goes wrong in a significant way then it seems to be fodder for headlines in the industry press.


NANOG 63: BGP Route Hijacks

This presentation looked at a number of specific examples of route hijacking. The examples included: Network hijacking to support the creation of bitcoin farms and bitcoin mining via hijacked pool of servers, which, in turn, may use a hijacked pool of routes. The scope of a Canadian hijack was limited…


NZNOG 2015: Networking the Pacific is not as simple as it seems

Jon Brewer for NSRC presented at NZNOG on the pacific networking scene. He did a really good job of showing how the pacific floor is covered by a mesh of fibre connecting the developed economies, but they have bypassed many of the smaller island economies. There are sound economic reasons…


NZNOG 2015: Virtual routers have a niche, but it IS a niche

Tim Nagy from Juniper presented on the virtual router model. This is when you take commodity hardware (PCs) and run a virtualized router image on it, to provide you with the same kind of functionality a real dedicated hardware router would do, but hopefully in a more scaleable manner for…