RSS Parrot

NZNOG 2026

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-04/nznog26.html

Published: April 12, 2026 05:40

NZNOG 2026 was held in Christchurch in March 2026. The NZ national community has a long track record of innovation, both in technology and in the underlying investment models for its network infrastructure. Here's a summary of some of the sessions that I…

The Last Time

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-03/endtime.html

Published: March 27, 2026 22:20

It's fading from our collective memory, but almost thirty years ago the global IT industry was gripped by Y2K fever. Another version of the counter rollover problem is coming back in 2036, 2038 and 2040. Hopefully we will avoid a large amount of hysteria…

The Why and What of the CIDR Report

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-03/cidr-report.html

Published: March 24, 2026 00:40

For some time, I have been looking after a routing analysis report called the "CIDR Report". Here I'd like to explain the reasons for this report, and what is in the report and share some thoughts as to its usefulness today to the Internet routing…

Revisiting Time

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-03/nts.html

Published: March 7, 2026 04:00

Today's digital world relies on a consistent view of the time. We achieve this with the Network Time Protocol (NTP). Given the extent of our reliance on an accurate time base it is surprusing that the NTP protocol has no security mechanisms to protect the…

Measuring DNS over IPv6

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-02/v6dns.html

Published: February 27, 2026 22:00

Is the DNS ready for IPv6? Are we ready to deploy IPv6-only Authoritative Nameservers? Let's measure the Internet to find out the answer!

NANOG 96

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-02/nanog96.html

Published: February 14, 2026 19:50

NANOG 96 was held in February 2026 at San Francisco. Here are my impressions on some of the presentations that were made at that meeting.

From the Stupid DNS Tricks Department: ipasn.net

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-02/ipasn.html

Published: February 8, 2026 21:50

It's quite surprising what you can do in the DNS when you break out of the conventional contsraints and adopt a more flexible view of the DNS query/response model.

IP Address to Organisation Name Map

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-01/ip2org.html

Published: January 27, 2026 05:20

The whois query tool is useful to identify which organisation holds an IP Address Prefix or an Autonomous System Number, but not so useful in performing the reverse query, listing all IP Addresses and Autonomous System Numbers held by an organisation.…

IP Addresses through 2025

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-01/addr2025.html

Published: January 19, 2026 18:30

It's 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.

BGP Updates in 2025

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-01/bgpupd2025.html

Published: January 8, 2026 06:30

The first part of this annual report on BGP for the year 2024 looked at the size of the routing table and some projections of table growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on…

BGP in 2025

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-01/bgp2025.html

Published: January 6, 2026 06:30

At the start of each year, it’s been my practice to report on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and…

Where are you? A look at GeoIP

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-12/geoip.html

Published: December 15, 2025 22:00

The activity of locating devices and users, termed "Geolocation" was the topic of a workshop, hosted by the Internet Architecture Board in early December 2025, and here I'd like to relate my impressions of the discussions that took place in this workshop.

NANOG 95

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-11/nanog95.html

Published: November 28, 2025 03:00

NANOG held its 95th meeting in Arlington, Texas in October of 2025. Here's my take on a few presentations that caught my attention through this three-day meeting.

A Second Look at Geolocation and Starlink

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-11/starlinkgeo2.html

Published: November 25, 2025 06:00

Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data. Some measurement systems, including the one we use at APNIC Labs, make relatively sweeping assumptions about the stability of both end user behaviour and network service behaviours, and assume that the changes…

How We Measure: IPv6

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-11/measure-ipv6.html

Published: November 13, 2025 17:00

At APNIC Labs we publish a number of measurements of the deployment of various technologies that are being adopted on the Internet. Here I will look at how we measure the adoption of IPv6.

Internet Evolution

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-11/evo.html

Published: November 8, 2025 22:00

This article is based on a presentation I made to the ARIN 56 meeting in October 2025. Here I'd like to elevate the typical Regional Internet Registry policy conversations above the day-to-day mundanities of address allocation policies with its vocabulary…

Some Notes from RIPE-91

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-10/ripe91.html

Published: October 28, 2025 11:00

The 91st meeting of the RIPE community was held in Bucharest in October this year. It was a busy week and, as usual, there were presentations on a wide variety of topics, including routing, the DNS, network operations, security, measurement and address…

Geolocation and Starlink

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-09/starlinkgeo.html

Published: September 29, 2025 23:00

"Where are you?" is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The Internet did not adopt a geographic address plan which means that you are going to need a lot of additional information if you want to map an IP address into a location at the level of…

AUSNOG 2025

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-09/ausnog25.html

Published: September 12, 2025 04:00

The Australian Network Operators' Group, AUSNOG, held its 19th meeting at the start of September. Rather than simply relate the content of the presentations I'd like to take a few presentations and place them into a broader context to show how such topics…

Measuring Explicit Congestion Notification

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-09/ecn-measure.html

Published: September 8, 2025 10:00

I've always thought that the TCP protocol was the heart of the ingenuity that is the Internet. TCP is a flow control protocol that strives to produce both fair efficient outcomes, both for each TCP session, but for the networ4k as well. The essential…

The Governance of the Root of the DNS

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-08/rssgwg.html

Published: August 29, 2025 17:00

The draft report of the Root Server System Governance Working Group is now out for public comment. Here's my thoughts on this report.

Congestion Control at IETF 123

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-08/cc_ietf123.html

Published: August 15, 2025 15:00

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to develop Internet Standards and related best practices. At its July 2025 meeting in Madrid, several sessions explored the evolving role of congestion control in transport protocols and…

Congestion Control at IETF 123

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-08/dns_ietf123.html

Published: August 15, 2025 15:00

As usual, IETF 123 was a busy week for DNS folk. I'll cover the material presented at the DELEG and DNSOP working groups. There is more to the DNS at IETF meetings than just these two working groups, and I'll skip over Adaptive DNS Discovery (ADD),…

IEPG at IETF 123

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-07/iepgietf123.html

Published: July 31, 2025 07:00

The IEPG meeting is held each Sunday at the start of the IETF week. There is no particular theme for these sessions, although subjects of operational relevance are encouraged (www.iepg.org). These are my impressions of the presentations that were made at…

Triggering QUIC

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-07/quic-trigger.html

Published: July 15, 2025 05:00

We look in detail at the mechanisms used to trigger a client application (typically a browser) to connect to the server using the QUIC transport protocol.

Ossification and the Internet

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-06/ossify.html

Published: June 24, 2025 07:00

The Internet was deliberately designed as a simple common substrate packet-switched network that could be able to support a huge variety of digital service profiles. The Internet's service profile was defined in the connecting devices at the edge, and not…

A QUIC Progress Report

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-06/quic.html

Published: June 16, 2025 05:00

There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. In so…

A Day in the Life of BGP

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-06/bgpday.html

Published: June 4, 2025 02:00

I want to look at just one day of the operation of the Internet’s BGP network by looking at the behaviour of a single BGP session. Nothing special or extraordinary happened on that day. There were no large-scale power blackouts, no major faults in the…

Resilience in the RPKI

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-05/rpkiresilience.html

Published: May 8, 2025 05:30

I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions,…

Analysis of a Route Leak

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-05/leak.html

Published: May 5, 2025 05:30

The way we've organised the Internet's routing system seems to be just too informal, too anarchic and too unstable to form the foundation of the world’s communication system. Yet, here we are. And, surprisingly, it works! Well, it mostly works, most of the…

Jevons Paradox and Internet Centrality

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-04/jevons.html

Published: April 29, 2025 07:00

William Stanley Jevons was one of the founders of neoclassical economics in the mid-nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the great railway mania of the mid 19th century he observed that the total consumption of coal had actually increased when…

Internet Governance - The End of Multi-Stakeholderism?

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2025-04/multistake.html

Published: April 15, 2025 21:30

The recent erratic moves by the US President to initiate a trade war on a global scale will have far-reaching implications beyond stock markets and will inevitably include the digital world and what we refer to as Internet Governance. The US moves on the…