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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Yesterday ICANN began DNSSEC signing the IDN .test zones. Over the next few days, we will be testing and carefully monitoring the system. It is not expected that DNSSEC or the testing will have any effect on normal DNS operations. Any user experiences or problems or feedback should be reported to <richard.lamb@icann.org>. This deployment is intended to demonstrate certain capabilities and also provide both ICANN and those interested in DNSSEC an opportunity to gain further experience with this new technology.

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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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More IPv4 /8s returned to an “IANA – Reserved” status in 2007 then ever before.

With help from the Regional Internet Registries, three /8s were returned in 2007 and last month we recovered one more. We now have 43 unallocated /8s. Here’s a table showing the details of the returned blocks.

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I am at the UN Internet Governance Forum, being held this week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A recurring theme you can hear here is one that has vexed the technical community many times before — “Why are there 13 root servers?” This question is usually followed by questions like “Why are most of the root servers in the US?”

So let’s dispel these myths.

There are not 13 root servers.

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