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Last month I attended the New Zealand Network Operators’ Group meeting (NZNOG’20). One of the more interesting talks for me was given by Cisco’s Beatty Lane-Davis on the current state of subsea cable technology. There is something quite compelling about engineering a piece of state-of-the-art technology that is intended 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…
It has become a tradition (or quite possibly a habit) each January for me to report on the behaviour of the inter-domain routing system over the past year, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying…
Packet switched networks benefit from buffers within the network’s switches. In the simplest case, if two packets arrive at a switch at the same time and are destined to the same output port, then one packet will need to wait in a buffer while the other packet is sent on,…
The 106th meeting of the IETF was in Singapore in November 2019. As usual for the IETF, there were many Working Group meetings, and this report is definitely not an attempt to cover all of these meetings or even anything close to that. Here I’ve been highly selective and picked…
DNS OARC held its 31st meeting in Austin, Texas on 31 October to 1 November. Here are some of my highlights from two full days of DNS presentations at this workshop. Building a New Nameserver There are two parts to DNS infrastructure. One is the infrastructure that supports resolving queries…
NANOG is now quite an institution in the Internet, particularly in the North American Internet community. It was an offshoot of the Regional Techs meetings, which were part of the NSFNET framework of the late 80s and early 90s. NANOG has thrived since then and is certainly one of the…
In this article I’d like to look at one particular aspect of the Internet’s inter-domain routing framework, namely the role of the Autonomous System (AS) Path in the operation of BGP, and in particular the use of AS Prepending. What is an Autonomous System? To introduce this topic a brief…
At various times the Internet has been touted as a triumph of the power of open markets and competition. This line of argument says that unfettered by the often regressive and stultifying hand of government regulation, open markets are able to react to the needs of consumers. The rigors of…
