APNIC

A friend of mine buzzed me yesterday about his missing route objects. Later multiple other ISPs told the same story which triggered me to put this as a question on INNOG Mailing list. Many folks replied of missing route objects there and it seems to be limited to IRINN members only. I also asked the same question on APNIC mailing list and it was again confirmed about the issue.
Before I proceed further, here’s what it is all about.

While I am spending time on APNIC’s security workshop here at APNIC 46, I got curious about DNSSEC deployment across ccTLDs. 

For those who may be unaware, DNSSEC adds signature the DNS responses making it possible to cryptographically verify a DNS query response. 

Out of 254 ccTLDs, 125 support DNSSEC with a published DS record (at least that is what I get when I check their zone) and 129 do not support it as yet. So, for now, it is at 49.21%. 

Often this comes into the subnetting discussion by my friends who are deploying IPv6 for the first time. How do you calculate subnets outside the 4-bit nibble boundary? This also happens to be one of starting points of APNIC IPv6 routing workshop where I occasionally instruct as community trainer.

So what is a Nibble boundary?

In IPv6 context, it refers to 4 bit and any change in multiple of 4 bits is easy to calculate. Here’s how: Let’s say we have a allocation: 2001:db8::/32. Now taking slices from this pool within 4 bit boundry is quite easy. /36 slices (1 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/36 2001:db8:1000::/36 2001:db8:2000::/36 and so on… /40 slices (2 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/40 2001:db8:0100::/40 2001:db8:0200::/40 /44 slices (3 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/44 2001:db8:0010::/44 2001:db8:0020::/44 /48 slices (4 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/48 2001:db8:0001::/48 2001:db8:0002::/48 Clearly, it seems much simple and that is one of the reasons we often strongly recommend subnetting within the nibble boundary and not outside for all practical use cases. However understanding why it’s easy this way, as well as things like how to subnet outside nibble boundary for cases, say if you are running a very large network and have a /29 allocation from RIR.

APNIC and RIPE NCC are doing a hackathon at APRICOT 2018. It just started today with some light interaction with various participating members yesterday. The theme of the hackathon is around IPv6. Many cool projects were suggested yesterday and teams started working today on certain shortlisted projects like:

1. A tool for ranking CDNs - A tool based on RIPE Atlas data to rank CDNs based on latency across different regions.
2. An IPv6 fun word game - Where anyone with a member account can suggest a word, and compete with other members who share more IPv6 addresses. It may include things like showcasing creative use of hexadecimal strings in an IPv6 address like Facebook popularly does face:b00c in their IPv6 pools.
3. IPv4 and IPv6 network security  - Study of attacks and overall security in IPv6. It would involve study and possibly a report on various attack vectors in the IPv6 domain.
4. A countrywide report on IPv6 deployment - I have yet to see how it is different from existing other reports.
5. IPv6 tunnel detection - Figuring out where tunnels used and figuring out the IPv4 address of those endpoints via a javascript plugin and possibly comparing IPv4 Vs IPv6 performance.

Let’s see how things go in next 12hrs. Super fun. Things should show up on Github in next few hours. :)

Talking about root DNS server’s anycast at APNIC42. YouTube here.