.@ Tony Finch – blog

The excitement definitely caught up with me today, and it was a bit of a struggle to stay awake. On Monday I repeated the planning error I made at IETF101 and missed a lie-in which didn’t help! D’oh! So I’m having a quiet evening instead of going to the RIPE official nightclub party.

Less DNS stuff on the timetable today, but it has still been keeping me busy:

CDS

During the DNS-OARC meeting I spoke to Ondřej Caletka of CESNET (the Czech national academic network) about his work on automatically updating DS records for reverse DNS delegations in the RIPE database. He had some really useful comments about the practicalities of handling CDS records and how dnssec-cds does or does not fit into a bigger script, which is kind of important because I intended dnssec-cds to encapsulate the special CDS validation logic in a reusable, scriptable way.

Today Anand Buddhdev of RIPE NCC caught me between coffees to give me some sage advice on how to help get the CDS automation to happen on the parent side of the delegation, at least for the reverse DNS zones for which RIPE is the parent.

The RIPE vs RIPE NCC split is important for things like this: As I understand it, RIPE is the association of European ISPs, and it’s a consensus-driven organization that develops policies and recommendations; RIPE NCC is the secretariat or bureaucracy that implements RIPE’s policies. So Anand (as a RIPE NCC employee) needs to be told by RIPE to implement CDS checking, he can’t do it without prior agreement from his users.

So I gather there is going to be some opportunity to get this onto the agenda at the DNS working group meetings tomorrow and on Thursday.

ANAME

As planned, I went through Matthijs’s comments today, and grabbed some time to discuss where clarification is needed. There are several points in the draft which are really matters of taste, so it’ll be helpful if I note them in the draft as open to suggestions. But there are other aspects that are core to the design, so it’s really important (as Evan told me) to make it easy for readers to understand them.

Jon Postel

Today was the 20th anniversary of Jon Postel’s death.

Daniel Karrenberg spoke about why it is important to remember Jon, with a few examples of his approach to Internet governance.

RFC 2468 - “I remember IANA”

Women in Tech

I skipped the Women in Tech lunch, even though Denesh suggested I could go - I didn’t want to add unnecessary cis-male to a women’s space. But I gather there were some good discussions about overthrowing the patriarchy, so I regret missing an opportunity to learn by listening to the arguments.

VXLAN / EVPN / Geneve

Several talks today about some related networking protocols that I am not at all familiar with.

The first talk by Henrik Kramshoej on VXLAN injection attacks looks like it is something my colleagues need to be aware of (if they are not already!)

The last talk was by Ignas Bagdonas on the Geneve which is a possible replacement for VXLAN. Most informative question was “why not MPLS?” and the answer seemed to be that Geneve (like VXLAN) is supposed to be easier since it includes more of the control plane as part of the package.

Flemming Heino from LINX talked about “deploying a disaggregated network model using EVPN technology”. This was interesting because of the discussion of the differences between data centre networks and exchange point networks. I think the EVPN part was to do with some of the exchange point features, which I didn’t really understand. The physical side of their design is striking, though: 1U switches, small number of SKUs, using a leaf + spine design, with a bit of careful traffic modelling, instead of a big chassis with a fancy backplane.

Other talks

At least two used LaTeX Beamer :-)

Lorenzo Cogotti on the high performance isolario.it BGP scanner

Florian Streibelt - BGP community attacks

Constanze Dietrich - human factors of security misconfigurations

Niels ten Oever - Innovation and Human Rights in the Internet Architecture

Tom Strickx - Cloudflare - fixing some anycast technical debt

Andy Wingo - 8 Ways Network Engineers use Snabb