The Politics of Submarine Cables in the Pacific

I must admit that I’m a keen follower of the analysis work done by Jon Brewer. He manages to pull together excellent research with valuable insights, and I look forward to his presentations. Jon can be found at Telco2. The second half of this article, looking at the inventory of…


The Path to Resolverless DNS

There is an intriguing mention of “Server Push” in the specification of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) (RFC 8484). The RFC is somewhat vague in the description of server push, apart from noting a caveat that “extra care must be taken to ensure that the pushed URI is one that the…


Are we there yet?

The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the…


Using LEOs and GEOs

Once you head away from the areas that are serviced by modern terrestrial cable infrastructure, the available digital communications options are somewhat limited. Some remote areas are served using High Frequency radio systems, using radio signals that bounce off the ionosphere to provide a long distance, but limited bandwidth, service.…


Hop by Hop

It is a rare situation when you can create an outcome from two somewhat broken technologies where the outcome is not also broken. Unless each of the components can precisely complement each other such that a weakness in one can be covered by a strength in the other, then the…


AUSNOG ’21

ISP Column – April 2022 AUSNOG was held in September 2021 December 2021 April 2022 in Sydney over two days. Here are a few notes from presentations at the meeting that I found interesting. Automating Network Management Network management was never the “sexy” part of the Internet. For decades network…


IETF 113 – IEPG Meeting

The IETF met in a hybrid format in March 2022. Here are my impressions from the IEPG meeting at the start of the week. The IEPG meets on the Sunday at the start of the IETF week. If there is a theme for the diverse collection of presentations here it…


IETF 113 – DNS Topics

The IETF met in a hybrid format in March 2022. Here are my impressions from the DNS-related Working Group sessions during the week. Handling Negative Caching of DNS Resolution Failure It has been a feature of the DNS that whenever there is a failure in serving DNS data, the query…


Revocation

Two years ago, I wrote an article on X.509 certificate revocation. I’d like to report that a lot has happened between then and now, but that’s not the case. So why revisit this topic today? What drew my attention was a tweet earlier this month that reported that the Certification…


DNS-OARC 37

There was a meeting of DNS Operations and Research group in February, DNS-OARC 37. These are my notes from the presentations that I found to be of interest. Zone File Bug Hunting The DNS is deceptively simple. Simple, in that are few choices in how to configure the zone information…