Internationalizing the Domain Name System
by Geoff Huston, APNIC
Considering the global reach of the Internet, internationalizing the network sounds like a tautology. Surely the Internet is already truly “international,” isn’t it? The Internet reaches around the globe to every country, doesn’t it? And no matter where you may travel these days, an Internet café is just around the corner. How much more “international” can you get?
The Locator Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP)
by David Meyer, Cisco Systems
The Internet Architecture Board’s (IAB)’s October 2006 Routing and Addressing Workshop renewed interest in the design of a scalable routing and addressing architecture for the Internet. Many concerns prompted this renewed interest, including the scalability of the routing system and the impending exhaustion of the IPv4 address space. Since the IAB workshop, several proposals have emerged that attempt to address the concerns expressed both at the workshop and in other forums. All of these proposals are based on a common concept: the separation of locator and identifier in the numbering of Internet devices, often termed the “Loc/ID split.” This article focuses on one proposal for implementing this concept: the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP).
Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals, by John Day.
It isn’t every day (pun intended) that one of the true Old Guard writes and publishes a book, and it behooves us to take notice. In this case, the author’s expertise and his subject matter are of particular timeliness, because of the worldwide resurgence of activities with regard to next-generation network architectures, that is, a replacement, or upgrade to the Internet (dare one say “Internet 2.0″?).
ICANN Recovers Large Block of Address Space
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has found a little breathing room in the IPv4 address space with its recovery of a block of 16 million IPv4 addresses.
IPv6 Address Added for Root Servers in the Root Zone
ICANN recently took another step along the path of deployment for the next-generation IPv6 Internet addressing system. IPv6 addresses were added for six of the world’s 13 root server networks (A, F, H, J, K, M) to the appropriate files and databases. This move allows for the possibility of fuller IPv6 usage of the Domain Name System (DNS). Prior to today, those using IPv6 had needed to retain the older IPv4 addressing system in order to be able to use domain names.
RIPE NCC Publishes Case Study of YouTube Hijack
As you may be aware from recent news reports, traffic to the youtube.com Website was “hijacked” on a global scale on Sunday February 24, 2008. The incident was a result of the unauthorized announcement of the prefix 208.65.153.0/24 and caused the popular video sharing Website to become unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. The RIPE NCC conducted an analysis into how this incident was seen and tracked by the RIPE NCC’s Routing Information Service (RIS) and has published a case study at: http://www.ripe.net/news/study-youtube-hijacking.html
IETF Examines Future of the Internet by Going IPv6 Native
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) put a spotlight on the next generation of Internet addressing when it switched off attendees’ access to IPv4 during its March 2008 meeting. For an hour, Internet engineers at the meeting could only access the Internet using an IPv6 network.
Postel Network Operator’s Scholarship 2008
The North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG) and the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) have been unique and successful cooperative fora for Internet builders in North America and other parts of the world. Senior practitioners from around the world contribute their time to NANOG and ARIN as presenters, teachers and trainers, to produce consistent non-commercial conferences of high-quality.
JPNIC Releases IPv4 Exhaustion Report
The Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC) has released a report entitled “Study Report on the IPv4 Address Space Exhaustion Issue (Phase I).” The report can be downloaded from the following link: http://www.nic.ad.jp/en/ip/ipv4pool/ipv4exh-report-071207-en.pdf
The Domain Name System (DNS) was not designed to support anything beyond 7-bit ASCII characters. Thus my middle name, Jørgen, or my colleague’s surname, Fältström, cannot be used in a domain name. In fact, even using such strings on the left side of the @&-sign—or in the body of an e-mail message—is problematic. We often find ourselves ignoring this limitation, using either “Jorgen” and “Faltstrom” or in some cases the two-letter convention “Joergen” and “Faeltstroem.” As Scandinavians, Mr. Fältström and I are relatively lucky in that our languages contain only three characters in addition to those that can be represented by 7-bit ASCII. This, of course, isn’t true for such languages as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, to name just a few. The IETF, ICANN, and others have been working hard to design and deploy a system that will allow native characters to appear in the DNS. Our first article discusses these efforts, known collectively as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). Geoff Huston gives an overview of IDNs and describes the many technical and political challenges that must be overcome in order to deploy such a system.
Recent activities have focused much attention on IPv6 deployment. Experiments have been conducted at several major Internet events (NANOG, APRICOT, and IETF) to “turn off” IPv4 for a period of time to test connectivity and interoperability to the outside world. You can read more about these experiments in our “Fragments” section on page 41. Such experiments provide valuable information about what works and what doesn’t, and several more IPv4 “outages” are planned for 2008 and beyond. At the same time, researchers have been looking at ways to scale the routing system of the Internet, regardless of IP protocol version. One such approach is the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP), which Dave Meyer describes in our second article.The next issue of The Internet Protocol Journal, to be published sometime in June 2008, will be our Tenth Anniversary issue. We would love to hear your reflections on the last ten years of this journal and about the Internet as a whole over the same time period. Send your Letters to the Editor to ipj@cisco.com
—Ole J. Jacobsen, Editor and Publisher
ole@cisco.com
Contents:
From the Editor
Internationalized Domain Names
LISP
Book Review
Fragments
Call for Papers
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