Potaroo blog

The IETF does not launch rockets, or design spacecraft, or even work on radio systems and spectrum assignment, but it has been engaged in the standardisation of communications protocols used to communicate with these spacecraft.

The 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was held in Vienna at the end of July 2026.

The 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was held in Vienna at the end of July 2026.

The share price of SpaceX is some USD $164 per share, and if you multiply that price by the total number of shares in the company you get a market capitalisation of USD $2.163 trillion.

These days you could be excused by suspecting that the world has gone AI-mad, and if you were at the NANOG 97 meeting your suspicions would've only been confirmed!

To what extent are DNS resolvers in today's Internet overly profligate in generating duplicate queries?

These days the Internet operates with vast infrastructure of replicated data, and the only differentiator between order and chaos is the ability to impose consistency upon the data through synchronisation across the distributed publication points of the s…

A presentation, by ISC's Ondřej Surý, at RIPE 92 was on the topic of DNS provisioning, looking at how to strike a balance between resilience and efficiency in the provisioning of nameservers of DNS zones and the performance of DNS resolvers. lets dive into

As a collection of inter-twined markets, aspects of the Internet have been prone to excessive market distortions where one, or a small clique, of providers in market sector become completely dominant to the extent that there is no effective competition and

Much has been said about the use of the DNS as a means of tracking and controlling the online behaviour of users.

It's a new space race with a number of satellite operators pushing out LEO satellite services that operate directly to hand-held devices, or D2D.

In October 2026 the Key-Signing Key of the DNS Root Zone will rolled to a new value.

How have we got to the point where certificates cannot be revoked?

NZNOG 2026 was held in Christchurch in March 2026.

It's fading from our collective memory, but almost thirty years ago the global IT industry was gripped by Y2K fever.

For some time, I have been looking after a routing analysis report called the "CIDR Report".

Today's digital world relies on a consistent view of the time.

Is the DNS ready for IPv6?

NANOG 96 was held in February 2026 at San Francisco.

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.

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.

It's time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses.

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.

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 beh…

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 held its 95th meeting in Arlington, Texas in October of 2025.

Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data.

At APNIC Labs we publish a number of measurements of the deployment of various technologies that are being adopted on the Internet.

This article is based on a presentation I made to the ARIN 56 meeting in October 2025.

The 91st meeting of the RIPE community was held in Bucharest in October this year.

"Where are you?"

The Australian Network Operators' Group, AUSNOG, held its 19th meeting at the start of September.

I've always thought that the TCP protocol was the heart of the ingenuity that is the Internet.

The draft report of the Root Server System Governance Working Group is now out for public comment.

As usual, IETF 123 was a busy week for DNS folk.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to develop Internet Standards and related best practices.

The IEPG meeting is held each Sunday at the start of the IETF week.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,…

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.

William Stanley Jevons was one of the founders of neoclassical economics in the mid-nineteenth century.

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.