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The ISP Column is published by Geoff Huston as a service of the Internet Society to its members. The opinions expressed within do not necessarily represent the views of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, nor those of the Internet Society.

Stateless and DNSperate

I’ve often heard it said that the world is full of bad ideas. But no matter how many bad ideas there may be, the good news is that there is always room for one more! So in the spirit of “more is better” I’d like to offer the following as yet another Bad Idea (http://bert.secret-wg.org/BIF/index.html). There is also the intriguing possibility that this flawed concept could be made to work, making this a Useless Tool (http://bert.secret-wg.org/Tools/index.html) at the same time!

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RIPE at 59!

RIPE, or Réseaux IP Européens, is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond. The objective of RIPE is to ensure the administrative and technical coordination necessary to enable the operation of a pan-European IP network. RIPE has been a feature of the European Internet landscape for some twenty years now, and it continues to be a progressive and engaged forum. These days RIPE meets twice a year, and the most recent meeting was held at Lisbon, Portugal, from the 5th to the 9th of October 2009. In this column I’d like to share some of my impressions of this meeting. (more…)

An Economic Perspective on IPv6 Transition

Many views of the transition to IPv6 assume that the combination of the factors of the imminent exhaustion of the unallocated pool of IPv4 addresses and the conventional dynamics of an open competitive marketplace in the ISP sector will be sufficient to propel the transition to IPv6. The question I would like to pose here is: Is this an appropriate view of the transition to IPv6? (more…)

AS Numbers – Again

IPv6 is not the only number resource that is running out in the coming couple of years. The same fate awaits the pool of Autonomous System numbers, used to support the inter-domain routing protocol, BGP. In the original design of BGP. A previous article in August 2005 (http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2005-08/as.html) explored AS numbers in some detail, so in this article I’d like to update the situation and look at we are doing about exhaustion some four years later. (more…)

The State of SIDR

In the last week of July the IETF held its 75th meeting in Stockholm. Most of the active working groups hold meetings in the week to review progress, debate current issues in their work and possibly consider the next steps to take in meeting their objectives. Sandy Murphy and I are the co-chairs of the Securing Inter-Domain Routing (SIDR) Working Group. The work has been underway for some years now, and in this column I’d like to take a look at where the SIDR work has got to and where it is heading. (more…)

Twenty Years Later

As I write this, on the 23rd June 2009, I’ve been reminded that some 20 years ago, on the night of the 23rd June 1989, Robert Elz of the University of Melbourne and Torben Neilsen of the University of Hawaii completed the connection work that brought the Internet to Australia with a permanent connection via a 56kbps satellite circuit.

Since that day we’ve evidently connected some 56.8% of the local population, or 12,073,852 Australians, to the Internet (according to recent Internet user statistics published by the ITU-T). While that’s an impressive outcome, I suppose I should say at the outset that when we started down this path in Australia some twenty years ago we had no intention of achieving this scale of outcome. Indeed we never thought that this type of data networking would ever cross the boundary from an esoteric tool to assist a select group of computer literate researchers and academics into the mainstream of society, and current concepts like twitter and social networking were completely foreign to us. In truth all we were trying to do was to save a bit of money for the universities and have some fun experimenting with some pretty novel technology on the way. (more…)

Predicting the End of the World

For some years now I’ve been running a set of scripts that attempt to model the consumption of IPv4 addresses and then use this model to look forward in time and predict the date at which the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses will be exhausted. The results of this model, together with a description of the process used in the model can be found at http://ipv4.potaroo.net. As the predicted date of exhaustion is getting to be a “right here and right now problem” rather than a “comfortably in the vague future, so its really someone else’s problem” its probably worth revisiting the model and the assumptions it makes so that you can choose for yourself whether to believe its predictions – or continue to press on with IPv4 and blithely ignore the entire problem for yet another day. (more…)

NAT++: Address Sharing in IPv4

In this article I’d like to look at the topic that was presented at a session at the 74th meeting of the IETF in March 2009, on Address sharing (the SHARA BOF), and look at the evolution of NAT architectures in the face of the forthcoming depletion of the unallocated IPv4 address pool. (more…)

BGP in 2008

Here in my part of the world the season has well and truly turned from summer to autumn, which means that another year has come and gone. I thought that it might be time to give MTU examination a rest for a month or more and instead review the last 12 months in BGP-land and see what’s been happening there. (more…)

Mutterings on MTUs

In the previous column I explored an error I had encountered where an IPv4-only web browser on my dual stack system could connect to a web server and retrieve the web pages, while a dual stack configured browser managed to get itself stuck displaying a white page. The Problem was a Path MTU “blackhole” and one possible method to avoid this is to reduce the local MTU size. But does a smaller packet size mean slower performance? (more…)

Disclaimer

About the Author

GEOFF HUSTON holds a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. from the Australian National University. He has been closely involved with the development of the Internet for many years, particularly within Australia, where he was responsible for the initial build of the Internet within the Australian academic and research sector. He is author of a number of Internet-related books, and is currently the Chief Scientist at APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry serving the Asia Pacific region. He was a member of the Internet Architecture Board from 1999 until 2005, and served on the Board of the Internet Society from 1992 until 2001.