Speaking of Standards

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.

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ipv6, videos, ripe

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.

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ietf, ipv6, standards, sip

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.

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ietf, ipv6, dns, icann