As expected, VeriSign raised the price of domain names, effective in October. New prices wholesale prices (to the registrar) for .com domain names are going from $6.42 to $6.86, while .net will increase from $3.85 to $4.23. This news came a few days ago in a letter to registrars. (Hint to consumers: renew your domains now.) ...So, basically, many if not most of VeriSign's registry costs have been falling at an exponential rate. Hard disk storage, computing performance, bandwidth, RAM storage... yet the cost is going up. How is this justified? more
Our recent cooperation with the OECD on IPv6 deployment inspired us to provide more IPv6 deployment statistics to a wider audience - from network operators to national governments. The result is an infographic that shows the percentage of networks or Autonomous Systems that announce one or more IPv6 prefixes in the global routing table. This metric shows how many networks have actually deployed IPv6 in a country or group of countries. more
Brokenness refers to the situation whereby a website is made accessible in dual stack, meaning both IPv4 and IP6, using records referred to as A's for IPv4 and quad A's for IPv6. Some end-users can experience slower access to the website or in some rarer instances no access at all. Brokenness is mostly attributable to older versions of the Mac Os operating system... The brokenness issue has been very well described by Eric Vyncke... more
IANA's IPv4 pool was officially exhausted in early 2011; Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are gradually eating through their remaining IPv4 reserves and, although there will always be a trickle of recycled IPv4 addresses coming through as businesses go bust or ISPs move entirely to IPv6, the bulk of RIR IPv4 activity in future will be maintenance of existing allocation records... While IPv6 is definitely the way of the future for the Internet, the sheer size of the IPv6 address pool, combined with simplified allocation policies that have deliberately reduced barriers to entry, means there are very few organizations that can't get IPv6 directly from the RIRs these days. more
As the unallocated IPv4 address pool runs out, are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) actually deploying IPv6? The graph, first in a series from RIPE Labs, looks at the IPv6 "ripeness" of all ISPs registered as RIPE NCC members. We created a rating system that gives ISPs up to four "stars" for IPv6 services that they provide, based on the following criteria... more
The eighth RIPE NCC hackathon takes on the Quantum Internet! The hackathon will be held during the weekend before RIPE 77 in Amsterdam, and is co-organised by QuTech and TU Delft, along with the RIPE NCC. We're bringing together network operators, quantum networking researchers, students, hackers, software developers and artists, to imagine and build the tools for the future Internet. more
NetworkWorld is running an article today that talks about the announcement from ARIN (the American Registry for Internet Numbers) of the ARIN Board resolution calling upon ARIN to no longer be "neutral" in the IPv4 vs IPv6 space and instead work to actively encourage migration to IPv6... Until now, ARIN and the other RIRs have generally been fairly neutral in the IPv4 versus IPv6 debate and have not shown a preference in allocation, but this announcement from ARIN shows the first signs of change. more
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has issued a public letter to ICANN calling on the organization to follow accountable, transparent, and fair processes. Until the concerns are addressed, CIRA says it is suspending its voluntary contributions to ICANN... more
A year ago, the RIPE NCC introduced IPv6 RIPEness -- a system that rates IPv6 deployment of Local Internet Registries (LIRs)... Now, one year later, the numbers have gone up... In absolute numbers: more than 3,000 LIRs have IPv6 address space. This means that the RIPE NCC has made more than 1,100 IPv6 allocations within 12 months. more
Security is great when all the green lights are shining brightly and everything validates as intended, but what happens when you encounter failure? In this work we examine the behaviour of the DNS when security, in the form of DNSSEC is added, and we look at what happens when things do not happen as intended. What triggered this examination was a sudden increase in the traffic generated by secondary servers for the in-addr.arpa reverse zones in December 2009. more
About a year ago, we shared some graphs that showed the percentage of IPv6 enabled networks over time. More precisely, it showed the percentage of Autonomous Systems (ASes) that announced one or more IPv6 prefixes in the global routing table. The results for the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) were described in an earlier CircleID post... We looked at the progress since then. more
Brownian motion is the ceaseless random movement of particles suspended in a warm fluid. The particles move because they are buffeted by random collisions with molecules and atoms speeding this way and that under the impetus of heat. The greater the heat, the greater the motion. But no matter how much motion and how much heat, Brownian motion brings no progress.
Today I learned from Bret Fausett's ICANN Blog that ICANN has just published its Sixth Status Report Under ICANN/US Government Memorandum of Understanding, dated March 31, 2003. This report is subtitled "Report by ICANN to United States Department of Commerce Re: Progress Toward Objectives of Memorandum of Understanding" (emphasis added.) more
After the DNS root zone was finally signed and a number of Top-Level Domains (TLDs) began signing their zones, we were curious to see how many clients actually request DNSSEC information. We looked at the RIPE NCC server that provides secondary service to several country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). more
In a series of recent blog posts I've described the technical challenges in registration operations, a proposal for an industry association, and announced an interactive workshop to explore association formation. This is an update on where things stand with the workshop. The first Registration Operations Association Workshop is scheduled for Thursday, 16 October 2014 in the Pacific Palisades room at the Los Angeles Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel, the same venue being used for ICANN 51. more
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. What happened in 2012 and what is likely to happen in 2013? This is an update to the reports prepared at the same time in previous years, 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