Speaking of Standards

We weren’t the only ones with April Fool’s Day posts, of course, and the web was littered with them last week. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) continued its very long tradition of participating (who can forget RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carriers?), although their 2009 contributions didn’t get out on the web until the evening of April 1, so many may have missed the pieces. They were:

• RFC 5513 – IANA Considerations for Three Letter Acronyms

• RFC 5514 – IPv6 over Social Networks

RFC 5513 suggests that because of the confusion with TLAs, IANA should create a registry for TLAs. Here is the abstract:

Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) are commonly used to identify components of networks or protocols as designed or specified within the IETF. A common concern is that one acronym may have multiple expansions. While this may not have been an issue in the past, network convergence means that protocols that did not previously operate together are now found in close proximity. This results in contention for acronyms, and confusion in interpretation. Such confusion has the potential to degrade the performance of the Internet as misunderstandings lead to misconfiguration or other operating errors.

Given the growing use of TLAs and the relatively small number available, this document specifies a Badly Construed Proposal (BCP) for the management of a registry of TLAs within the IETF, and the procedures for the allocation of new TLAs from the registry.

Linguists and others who are find language amusing or interesting may enjoy the full document.

RFC 5514 also confronts a daunting issue, namely the low adoption of IPv6, and suggests that the solution is to route IPv6 across social networks and in particular Facebook:

There is a lack of IPv6 utilization in early 2009; this is partly linked to the fact that the number of IPv6 nodes is rather low. This document proposes to vastly increase the number of IPv6 hosts by transforming all Social Networking platforms into IPv6 networks. This will immediately add millions of IPv6 hosts to the existing IPv6 Internet. This document includes sections on addressing and transport of IPv6 over a Social Network. A working prototype has been developed.

The amusing part is that some folks actually did write a prototype Facebook application.

Fun, fun, fun…

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Technorati Tags: IETF, april1, aprilfools, facebook, ipv6

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This video is about six months old, but after a friend reminded me of it, I realized that I had to blog about it. I mean, how can you not be amused by “The Day The Routers Died…” (once you adjust to the use of the European “rooter” vs the American “rowter”):

Note that if you click on the video and go to the YouTube page, you can click on the “More Info” link and get the full words.

For those not familiar with RIPE, it is an open organization for Europeans interested in the Internet and through the RIPE Network Coordination Centre provides allocation of IP addresses, domain names and other aspects of Internet “policy” (such that there is) in the European region. This song was performed at their last meeting (RIPE 55) and their next meeting, RIPE 56, is coming up May 5-9 in Berlin.

Kudos to whoever spent the time to come up with these lyrics and to the gent performing it! Nicely done.

Technorati Tags: ipv6, videos, ripe

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In the list of recently published RFCs, I was intrigued to see RFC 5118, “Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Torture Test Messages for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)“. This is really a companion document to RFC 4475 that provides IPv6-related messages you can use while testing SIP. From the overview:

This document is informational, and is *not normative* on any aspect of SIP.

This document contains test messages based on the current version (2.0) of the Session Initiation Protocol as defined in [RFC3261].

This document is expected to be used as a companion document to the more general SIP torture test document [RFC4475], which does not include specific tests for IPv6 network identifiers.

This document does not attempt to catalog every way to make an invalid message, nor does it attempt to be comprehensive in exploring unusual, but valid, messages. Instead, it tries to focus on areas that may cause interoperability problems in IPv6 deployments.

As IPv6 continues to move (slowly) along, it’s great to see an example like this RFC 5118 that can aid people who are developing SIP apps for IPv6.

Technorati Tags: ietf, ipv6, standards, sip

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And so the real use of IPv6 on the public Internet begins. In a BBC article “Overhaul of net addresses begins“, the writer notes this:

On 4 February the master or root servers for the net will have a small number of records added that are written in IP version 6 (IPv6) added to them.

This means for the first time that computers using IPv6, typically a PC and a server, can find each other without involving any IPv4 technology.

Yes, indeed, IPv6 is now live in a useful way.

You have, of course, been able to use IPv6 for quite some time, but only really between sites that knew the address of the other end. The global DNS system for resolving names to IP addresses only supported IPv4 at the top-level root name servers. So if you tried to connect to any other site out there via DNS, you were always getting IPv4 addresses through what are called “A” records in DNS parlance. Now, as of yesterday, you can also get back IPv6 addresses through “AAAA” records.

IPv6 is still a long way from being commonly deployed, but at least with this step the people out there who want to use it, or at least experiment with using it, can now actually resolve addresses through parts of the global DNS infrastructure. Of course, DNS only returns an IPv6 address for sites that have such an address entered into DNS, so it won’t truly start being useful until more people: a) have IPv6 addresses assigned to their servers, etc.; and b) enter those addresses in their DNS tables. Still, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

FYI, those of us who subscribe to the IETF discussion list were told about this impending change back on January 4th, and if you would like to really understand how all this works on a technical level, a report is available from ICANN’s Root Server System Advisory Committee and Security and Stability Advisory Committee that goes into intricate detail about the impacts of this move. For those not familiar with how the DNS system works at a technical level, Appendix A starting on page 19 is well worth a read.

Technorati Tags: ietf, ipv6, dns, icann

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