Publications 

One of the major principles of the architecture of the Internet was encapsulated in a paper by Saltzer, Reed and Clark, “End-to-End Arguments in System Design”. This paper, originally published in 1981, encapsulated vary clearly the looming tension between the network and the application: (more…)

Geoff Huston & George Michaelson

I suppose we all know the plot by now. Back in the early 1990’s it was forecast that we would run out of IPv4 addresses well before we were ready for the Internet to stop working, and that we’d need to transition the Internet to use a new version of the IP protocol that allowed for a larger address space if we wanted to avoid the problem. In response to this, the technical community came up with a specification for IP version 6 by the mid 1990’s and we were all set. (more…)

I suppose it had to happen one of these days. Sooner or later a routing hijack would get its 15 seconds of fame in the industry press, and the incident relating to the YouTube prefix just happened to be the one that was selected by the media because of the players involved rather than the rather mundane characteristics of the routing leak itself. (more…)

In every ISP’s engineering group there invariably lurks a list of those tasks that lie just a little a bit beyond the normal day to day activity of reacting to events as they happen. For many the item “IPv6??!! has been on this “to do” list for some years, if not for the entire lifetime of the ISP itself! (more…)

After looking at the state of DNSSEC in some detail a little over ayear ago in 2006, I’ve been intending to come back to DNSSEC to see if anything has changed, for better or worse, in the intervening period. (more…)

I’m writing this column in November, and that means that its time for the travelling circus known as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to come down to earth, unpack its tents and sell tickets for its annual song and dance routine. The script for this year’s show has been changed, and after being excluded from the main arena last year at the Athens gig, the headline act of “Critical Internet Resources” is taking a starring role this year in Rio. Some folk are even saying that it’s the single most contentious issue to be scheduled at this year’s IGF show. (more…)

There are many network operator group meetings being held these days. Even in the backwater of the South Pacific where I live there is now AUSNOG, and NZNOG is just next door in New Zealand. We now have MENOG in the Middle East and AFNOG in Africa. The original NOG was the North American Network Operators Group, NANOG, and they have the T-Shirts to prove it! NANOG meets three times a year, and I attended NANOG 41 in October 2007. NANOG meetings cover a broad variety of topics, from operational tools, measurement, and peering practices through to a commentary on the state of the Internet industry. Here’s my impressions of the meeting. (more…)

I suppose I’m no different to many people who have spent some time in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in making the observation that I’ve always been fascinated by the process of technology development. (more…)

Trust and networking go hand in hand, and I’m pleased to see that the topic of trust has been raised by the Internet Society recently. (more…)

Last month’s ISP Column looked at the exhaustion of the IPv4 unallocated address pool and the state of preparedness in the Internet to grapple with this issue. It concluded with the observations that: (more…)

Funny how some topics seem sit on a quiet back burner for years, and then all of a sudden become matters of relatively intense attention. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a number of pronouncements on the imminent exhaustion of the IP version 4 address pools. (more…)

The topic of the scalability of the Internet’s routing system has been one that has achieved elevated attention in recent months, and that’s not counting the five articles in this column in the past 12 months! (more…)