At ICANN’s meeting in Egypt last week, I had the opportunity to try and explain to various non-technical audiences why the Domain Name System (DNS) is vulnerable to attack, and why that is important, without needing a computer science degree to understand it. Here is the summary.

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IPv6 is in the news because the mainstream media have started to pick up the fact that IPv4 will be fully allocated in the next two or three years. And IPv6 deployment is important if we want to keep the Internet growing sustainably.

So where is IPv6 deployment most evident? It?s a very difficult thing to measure. It is difficult to measure the amount of IPv6 traffic as so much of it is tunneled inside of IPv4. And anyway, tunneled traffic is probably from end users rather than ISPs, but we need ISPs to deploy IPv6 to allow the Internet to grow. So how can we see where ISPs are deploying IPv6 in their networks?

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Every year there are new world events that see possible border changes and a restructure to the way the world’s countries and territories are configured. Think back to 50 years ago, and the world’s map was very different. There are literally a hundred countries that exist today that did not exist a hundred years ago. I wonder what country code the Ottoman Empire would have?

As these events occur, ICANN invariably receives requests to recognise new sovereign entities. In some cases we see very inaccurate press reports by “experts” on how country codes will be assigned. Thankfully, we have a very clear process for this that it is worth repeating.

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In February I commented about how we have been doing some research into the use of unallocated address space on the Internet.

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It is sometimes said that ISPs do not offer IPv6 transport and equipment vendors offer just partial IPv6 support because there is no customer demand. The counter argument is often made that consumers can only buy what is on offer so people prefer to buy production quality services and equipment.

Unfortunately, even when production quality IPv6 transport and network infrastructure are available it is not always possible to deploy a completely IPv6 accessible network. One problem is the difficulties domain name registrants have when they ask their domain name registrar to include their IPv6 glue in the DNS. Not many domain name registrars support glue registration for IPv6 addresses. This limits their ability to provide an IPv6 DNS service.

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Tonight on American television quiz show Jeopardy, a piece of IANA-esoterica was the “Final Jeopardy” question of the night:

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As noticed by some in the Internet network operations community, at the beginning of May an odd event occurred as ICANN ended DNS service on the IP address formerly associated with L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET (”L-root”). Specifically, as ICANN turned off the DNS service at the address formerly used by the L-root, 198.32.64.12 (and the routing announcement by ICANN for 198.32.64.0/24), DNS root queries sent to that address instead of the new L-root address (199.7.83.42) continued to be answered.

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Back in October I wrote about how my landlord provides an Internet connection with a private IPv4 address. I explained that I want to connect several devices and so I have installed my own NAT and now sit behind a “double NAT”. The only problems I’ve had have been with some VoIP software that can’t jump multiple NATs.

My landlord isn’t the only ISP providing an Internet connection using private IPv4 addresses. As mentioned at the last AfriNIC meeting, there are many millions of connections sitting behind hierarchies of IPv4 NATs.

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Last week we improved the format of the IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry. It is now much easier to see which address space is available for allocation to RIRs and which address space is reserved for Multicast and Future Use.

We made other changes, too. The IPv4 registry used to report that a lot of /8s were allocated to “Various Registries”. That wasn’t very helpful to anyone; it was a bit like saying “we don’t know”. In fact, the RIRs have been providing DNS and Whois services for addresses in these /8s but the IANA IPv4 registry didn’t indicate which RIR to consult because addresses in each of these /8s are often used by organisations in different RIR regions.

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