DNS Zombies

It seems that some things just never die, and this includes DNS queries. In a five month experiment encompassing the detailed analysis of some 44 billion DNS queries we find that one quarter of these DNS queries are zombies – queries that have no current user awaiting the response, and…


NANOG 66

NANOG continues to be one of the major gatherings on network operators and admins, together with the folk who work to meet the various needs of this community. Their program committee produces a program that never fails to provide thought provoking interest. Here are my reactions to some of the…


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…


Fragmentation

One of the more difficult design exercises in packet switched network architectures is that of the design of packet fragmentation. In this article I’d like to examine IP packet fragmentation in detail and look at the design choices made by IP version 4, and then compare that with the design…


Addressing 2015

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. What happened in 2015 and what is likely to happen in 2016? This is an update to the reports prepared at the same time in previous years, so let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in…


Getting multi-economy ASN IPv6 stats right

The stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6 web has just grown a new feature: it can now account for the ASN contribution to an economies visible IPv6, when the ASN is not ‘resident’ in that economy. For most graphs, this doesn’t change much. But for some economies, its exposing the contribution of some significant ASN…


What’s in a Name?

What’s in a name? that which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet;Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II What’s the difference between .local and .here? Or between .onion and .apple? All four of these labels are capable of being represented in the Internet’s Domain Name…


RIPE 71 Meeting Report

The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days so this is by no means all that was presented through…