BGP in 2020 – BGP Update Churn

The first part of this 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 routing…


BGP in 2020 – The BGP Table

At the start of each year I have been reporting on the behaviour of the inter-domain routing system over the past 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.…


DNS Oblivion

Technical development often comes in short intense bursts, where a relatively stable technology becomes the subject of intense revision and evolution. The DNS is a classic example here. For many years this name resolution protocol just quietly toiled away. The protocol wasn’t all that secure, and it wasn’t totally reliable,…


DNS Flag Day 2020

The architecture of the Internet took a highly radical step in the evolution of wide area communications protocols. Rather than placing much of the functionality into the network infrastructure and using network functions to emulate reliable edge-to-edge circuitry, the Internet Protocol used a network service model that was minimal and…


DNS 2XL

The first part of this report on the handling of large DNS responses looked at the behaviour of the DNS, and the interaction between recursive resolvers and authoritative name servers in particular and examined what happens when the DNS response is around the Internet’s de facto MTU size of 1,500…


IETF 109

For a group that works on network technologies it was always a bit odd that the IETF met in person three times a year. Didn’t we have enough trust in the efficacy in the technologies that we work on? I don’t think that is the case. I think the bandwidth…


DNS XL

We’ve written a number of times about the issues of managing packet sizes in packet-switched networks. It’s an interesting space that is an essential part of the design of packet-switched networks, and a space where we still seem to be searching for a robust design. This work has been prompted…


DNS Trends

We used to think of computer networks as being constructed using two fundamental common infrastructure components: names and addresses. Every connected device had a stable protocol address to allow all other devices to initiate a communication transaction with this device by addressing a data packet too this protocol address. And…


Securing Routing Q&A’s

Over the past few months I’ve had the opportunity at various network operator meetings to talk about BGP routing security and also highlight a measurement page we’ve set up that measures the extent to which Route Origin Validation (RoV) is actually “protecting” users (https://stats.labs.apnic.net/rpki). By this I mean we’re measuring…


Going Postal

When a service is constructed using diverse components, then the way in which service revenues are distributed to the various suppliers of the components of the service can follow a number of quite distinct models. There are various forms of revenue redistribution models where the revenue per transaction is distributed…