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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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,…
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…
