IPv6 Fragmentation Loss

Committees should never attempt to define technology There always seems to be a point in the process where there is a choice between two quite different options, and there is no convincing case that one choice is outstandingly better than the other. Committees find it terribly hard to decide at…


DNS at IETF 110

IETF 110 was held virtually in March 2020. These are some notes I took on the topic of current activities in the area of the Domain Name System and its continuing refinement at IETF 110. The amount of activity in the DNS in the IETF seems to be growing every…


TCP Congestion Control at IETF 110

IETF 110 was held virtually in March 2020. These are some notes I took on the topic of current research activities in the area of transport protocol flow control at the meeting of the Internet Congestion Control Research Group at that meeting. HPCC+: High Precision Congestion Control In the early…


Measuring ROAs and ROV

There are a number of parts to the current framework that we’re using to improve routing security on the Internet. Prefix holders should generate validly signed Route Origination Attestations (ROAs) and have them published, Network operators should maintain a current local cache of these signed objects and use then to…


Notes from the DNS Privacy Workshop at NDSS 2021

For many years the consuming topic in DNS circles was that of the names themselves. If you wind the clock back twenty years or so you would find much discussion about the nature of the Internet’s name space. Why were there both generic top-level labels and two-letter country codes. If…


Notes from NANOG 81

As the pandemic continues, the network operational community continues to meet online. NANOG held its 81st meeting on February 8 and 9, and these are my notes from some of the presentations at that meeting. A Brief History of Router Architecture Ethernet, developed in 1973 at Xerox PARC, was a…


DNS OARC 34

It’s an interesting topic of speculation to think about what form of network architecture would we be using if we were start afresh using today’s world of scalable content and service distribution as the starting point. Like the “clean slate” discussions of over a decade ago, if we were to…


An IPv6 Update for 2020

The Australian Domain Name Administration, AUDA, has recently published its quarterly report for the last quarter of 2020. The report contained the interesting snippet: “The rapid digitisation of our lives and economy – necessitated by COVID-19 – continued to underpin strong growth in .au registrations. New .au domains created in…


The Internet of Trash

It’s often a clear signal that we’re in in deep trouble when politicians believe that they need to lend a hand and help out with regulations. A bill has been passed by the US Congress, and now signed into law, that requires the National Institute of Science and Technology to…


Addressing 2020

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992 the IETF gazed…