pumplekin

Microsoft Azure has two entirely seperate regions.

A "full function" one in/around London. And a "tickbox" one for multi-region requirements near Cardiff.

The tickbox one has constant capacity constraints and a large number of Azure services aren't in it, but if you need to tick the "two regions and in country" requirement, you kinda/sorta can.

Not DOS, but two similar era cases.

A FTSE 100 company I used to work for, still maintains a SCO UNIX machine that was first installed in 1993. It hasn't had any upgrades since, has specialist hardware in it, and still has an IP stack that is classful (ie. no subnet masks, 10.x.x.x is always a /8). It runs in a 100% airgapped network, and it isn't essential to keeping the core companies operations, but it is a ticking time bomb nobody seems to want to address that will cause a lot of distruption when it finally dies.

Also I was recently (very lightly) involved in a consultancy project to remove an OS/2 based point of sale system for a small local retailer with 6 stores.

.uk and .co.uk are both run by Nominet, the UK registry.

Quirky stuff like .co.uk / .org.uk / .sch.uk 2nd level domains partly come around from .uk being the worlds first CCTLD outside the US (and as other parts of this thread say, .us isn't that popular a CCTLD).

Everything was new and different people tried different hierarchy and structures to 2LD and 3LD's. .co.uk is also far from unique, I know this is common in many other places (UK/NZ/IN/ZA/KR/MX).

The UK now allows directy foo.uk registrations as well, but many people still have SLD's registered and will continue to do so.

BFD or Ethernet-OAM is the standard here.

It can get a bit hardware dependant but getting <50ms failovers from software based BFD in BIRD or FRR is fairly easy, and I've tested down to < 1ms before with hardware based BFD echo. ~50ms is the point at which a user making a traditional VOIP call won't notice the path switch.

You can get NIC's for computers (like most Nvidia/Meallanox or higher end Broadcom/Intel NIC's that do hardware BFD, and its obviously included in higher end networking kit.

You then link the BGP routes to the health of the BFD session for which that path is the next hop, and you get super quick withdrawls.

This is due to advertising standards. They are required to advertise "average speed", although how this is actually calculated is nebulous.

A&A not advertising can just say what the link speeds actually are on the product pages.

Other ISP's could do this too, but it would cause confusion having one figure on the advert and one figure on the product pages, and they might get in trouble if they link to the product pages in the adverts.

.uk being the TLD, and .gb being the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code is a quirk of history that comes with .uk being on the internet very early.

I once wrote something that did, as an internal tool.

It was basically an MPLS traceroute tool that used LOC records on RFC1918 loopbacks to plot pretty maps (well, the lines were way too straight on long range links, but ...).

It was used by marketing and basically nobody else, but it existed !

I've always thought we could put a bit of general purpose TCAM into general purpose computers instead of just routers and switches, and see what people can do with it.

I know (T)CAM's are used in CPU's, but I am nore thinking of the kind of research being done with TCAM's in SSD like products, so maybe we will get there some day.

The idea of an IX, or IX peering LAN is simple in concept. It is a LAN (a flat, layer2 network), to which multiple ISP's can plug in routers.

Like your home LAN might have 192.168.0.1 = router, 192.168.0.2 = laptop, 192.168.0.3 = phone etc, a peering LAN will have things like 195.66.224.21 = HurricaneElectric, 195.66.224.22 = NTLI, 195.66.224.31 = Akamai, 195.66.224.48 = Arelion etc ...

So instead of all these ISP's that want to exchange traffic with each other having to assign ports and run cables in a full mesh (which quickly would get out of control), everyone connects to the "big switch in the middle" with that peering LAN on it, and they use that.

Back in the day, that might have been an actual single big switch, or a stack of switches. Now IXP infrastructures are much more complex, but the presentation to the end user is usually still a cable (or bundle of cables) that goes into something that looks to them like a "big switch".

There is a LOT more to know about this space (Peering vs Transit, PNI's, L3 internet exchanges, what Google are doing by withdrawing from IXP's), but I wanted to write a comment that didn't turn into an essay.

The general root servers generally don't support AXFR, but if you want to AXFR the root, you can do so from lax.xfr.dns.icann.org or iad.xfr.dns.icann.org.

There is work coming at the IETF to help with this.

- Draft: DELEG (a new way of doing delegations, replacing the NS/DS records).

- A draft to follow: Using the extensible mechanisms of DELEG to allow you to specify alternative transports for those nameservers (eg: DoH/DoT/DoQ).

This would allow a recursive server to make encrypted connections to everything it talks to (that has those DELEG records and supports encrypted transports) as part of resolution.

Of course, traffic analysis still exists. If you are talking to the nameservers of bigtittygothgirls.com, and the only domains served by those name servers are bigtittygothgirls ...

We don't have leash laws like in the US, so it is common for dogs to just be allowed to run around in most community parks.

The problem with sighthounds is they will lock on to squirrels, rabbits or other things, and running at 40mph will be out of sight and lost VERY quickly.

So we don't let ours off lead except in controlled places (like this one).

I live in Scotland, have two former racing greyhounds, and I'm very grateful for a local farmer who has a dog run / playpark with an honesty box we can drop something in to help with upkeep when we give our two a nice run.