Recent Articles
Counting IPv6 in the DNS
November 2012
At the recent ARIN XXX meeting in October 2012 I listened to a debate on a policy proposal concerning the reservation of a pool of IPv4 addresses to address critical infrastructure. This term is intended to cover a variety of applications, including use by public Internet Exchanges and authoritative nameservers for various top level domains. As far as I can tell, the assumptions behind this policy proposal includes the assumption that a top level authoritative nameserver will need to use IPv4 for the foreseeable future, so that an explicit reserved pool of these IPv4 addresses needs to be maintained for use by the authoritative nameservers for these domain names. But it this really the case? If you set up an authoritative DNS nameserver for a domain name where all the nameservers were only reachable using IPv6, then what is the visibility of this nameserver? What proportion of the Internet's user base could still access the name if access to the authoritative nameservers was restricted to only IPv6?
more...
NANOG 56
November 2012
NANOG held its 56th meeting in Dallas on October 21 through 24. The following are my impressions of the presentations at this meeting.
more...
Re-Counting DNSSEC
October 2012
This is a followup article to Counting DNSSEC that reflects some further examination of the collected data. This time I'd like to describe some additional thoughts about the experiment, and some revised results in our efforts to count just how much DNSSEC is being used out there.
more...
NORDUnet 2012 - My Impressions
October 2012
I was able to attend NORDUnet 2012 in September of this year as an invited speaker. This is a brief report of my impressions of this meeting.
more...
Counting DNSSEC
October 2012
At the Nordunet 2012 conference in September, a presentation included the assertion that "more than 80% of domains could use DNSSEC if they so chose." This is an interesting claim that speaks to a very rapid rise in the deployment of DNSSEC in recent years, and it raises many questions about the overall status of DNSSEC deployment in today's Internet. The question now is: how is all this playing out in the world of the DNS? How many DNS zones are DNSSEC-signed? To what extent are Internet user's able to trust in the integrity of DNS name resolution? How many Internet users use DNS resolvers that perform DNSSEC validation? Lets try and answer these questions.
more...
Network Service Models and the Internet
September 2012
In recent times we've covered a lot of ground in terms of the evolution of telecommunications services, riding on the back of the runaway success of the Internet. We've taken the computer and applied a series of transformational changes in computing power and size, battery technology and radio systems to create a surprising result. We've managed to put advanced computation power in a form factor that fits in the palm of my hand, and couple it with a communications capability that can manage data flows of tens if not hundreds of megabits per second. All in a device that has as few as two buttons! But a few clouds that have strayed into this otherwise sunny story of technological wonder.
more...
The End, Part 2
August 2012
Once upon a time we thought that the end of the IPv4 phase of the Internet would be relatively quiet and possibly even pass unnoticed. The optimistic thought was that before we were even close to exhaustion of the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses we would've not only started off with the transition to IPv6, but we would've completed it. And having completed the transition, the remaining IPv4 addresses in the unallocated pool would sit there indefinitely, unwanted and unneeded.
more...
Leaping Seconds
August 2012
The tabloid press are never lost for a good headline, but this one in particular caught my eye: "Global Chaos as moment in time kills the Interwebs". I'm pretty sure that "global chaos" is somewhat over the top, but there was a problem happening on the 1st of July this year, and yes, it impacted the Internet in various ways, as well as many other enterprises who rely on IT systems. And yes, the problem had a lot to do with time and how we measure it.
more...
Carriage vs Content
July 2012
Does anyone remember the Internet before Google? And no, using Google to ask about the pre-Google Internet is not going to work all that well! For those of you who can recall the Internet of around 2000, do you also recall what debates were raging at the time? Let me give you a hand in answering that question. One big debate at the time was all about the relationship between the carriage service operators and the content providers, and, as usual, it was all about money. The debate was about who owed who money, and how much. Ten years later and it seems that nothing much has changed.
more...
All Your Packets Belong to Us
July 2012
On the 18th June, it was reported on an Australian users' forum, Whirlpool, that whenever a Telstra mobile data service user contacted a web site, then some 250 ms later the same web site URL was fetched from a different source address. It appeared that somehow this third party was stalking the mobile data user, visiting all the same web sites as the user, in every case shortly after the user.
more...
Measuring IPv6 - Country by Country
July 2012
Some years ago a report was published that ranked countries by the level of penetration of broadband data services. You can find the current version of that report at the OECD web site.This ranking of national economies had an electrifying impact on this industry and upon public policies for broadband infrastructure in many countries. Perhaps this happened because there were some real surprises lurking in the numbers at the time. more...
Occam's ITRs
July 2012
It's been a quarter of a century since the world's governments convened to draft up a common set of regulations about the conduct of international telecommunications. In December of 2012 the world's governments will convene to reconsider these regulations, to hopefully sign an updated set of regulations. This time around, this activity is generating considerable levels of public interest. Congressional hearings in the United States have been held, and various pronouncements of intent from various governmental, regional, and industry groups have been made. The level of interest in international telecommunications is high, and the diversity of views about what should be expressed in a revised set of regulations is also evident. more...
The QoS Emperor's Wardrobe
June 2012
When we take the public Internet and look at QoS there is an glaring credibility gap: we can't build it, and applications can't use it. If you really think that the network itself is the problem and QoS is the answer, then there is always another, very simple, response: get more bandwidth. That's as true now as it was almost twenty years ago. Nothing has changed. So why revisit this topic now? more...
A report on the OECD/BEREC Workshop on Interconnection and Regulation
June 2012
I presented at a OECD/BEREC workshop that was held on the 20th June in Brussels, and I'd like to share some personal impressions and opinions from this workshop. more...
Bemused Eyeballs
May 2012
How do you create a really robust service on the Internet? How can we maximise speed, responsiveness, and resiliency? How can we set up an application service environment in today's network that can still deliver service quality and performance, even in the most adverse of conditions? And how can we engineer applications that will operate robustly in the face of the anticipated widespread deployment of Carrier Grade NATs (CGNs) as the Internet lumbers into a rather painful phase of a depleted IPv4 free pool and continuing growth pressures. Yes, IPv6 is the answer, but between here and there are a few challenges. And one of these is the way applications behave in a dual stack environment more...
A Quick Primer on Internet Peering and Settlements
April 2012
The business world today features many complex global service activities which involve multiple interconnected service providers. Customers normally expect to execute a single paid transaction with one service provider, but many service providers may assist in the delivery of the service. These contributory service providers seek compensation for their efforts from the initial provider. However, within a system of interdependent providers a service provider may undertake both roles of primary and contributory provider, depending of the context of each individual customer transaction. In a system where there are many mutual service provision transactions it is common to see the use of a balance of services used in place of individual transaction payments between providers, and the use of inter-provider financial settlements as a means of reconciling residual imbalances in the accounting of such mutual service provision tasks. In this article I~d like to describe how this has been applied to the Internet, and look at the Internet's approach to interconnection and financial settlements. more...
It's just not Cricket: Number Misuse, WCIT and ITRs
April 2012
Another twenty five years has just zoomed by, and before you know it, it's all on again. The last time the global communications sector did this was at the WATTC in 1988, when the Internet was just a relatively obscure experiment in protocol engineering for data communications. At that time the Rather Grand telephone industry bought their respective government representatives (at the time the generally cosy relationships between governments and their monopoly telephone companies often made it extremely difficult to tell them apart!) to the Rather Grandly titled "World Administrative Telegraph and Telephone Conference (WATTC) in November 1988 in Melbourne, Australia and resolved to agree to the Rather Grandly titled "International Telecommunication Regulations." more...
Leaking Routes
March 2012
Its happened again. We've just had yet another major routing leak, this time bringing down the Internet for most of an entire country. Maybe twenty years ago no one would've noticed, let alone comment, but now of course its headline material in the media. What happened? And how could this have been prevented? Can we do better? I'd like to look at this incident in here, and also look at the implications for the current efforts to secure our inter-domain routing system, BGP. more...
Detecting Bogon Filters
February 2012
Until recently IP network operators were encouraged to set up so-called "bogon address filters" at the edge of their networks. These filters were intended to discard all incoming traffic where the source address in the IP header was from a block of addresses that was known to be unallocated. The inference was that a matching packet was either an unintentional leak from some privately addressed network domain or was generated using source address spoofing. In either case there is no point in delivering the packet, since it comes from a demonstrably fictitious source. However bogon filters have caused their fair share of connectivity problems. The question I'd like to look at here is: is it possible to remotely detect the use of these filters? more...
Addressing 2011 - One Down, Four to Go!
January 2012
It’s January again, and being the start of another year, it’s as good a time as any to look at the last 12 months and see what the Internet was up to in 2011. So lets 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. more...