Researchers have traditionally shared information about their ongoing work via mailing lists, conferences and publications in journals and at conferences. Recently, some researchers have started their own blog where they post reflections, discuss about research fundings or ongoing projects. Here are a few blogs maintained by networking researchers or operators that a networking researcher may find useful :

Networking researchers

• SIGCOMM's official blog
• Nick Feamster's blog
  

A good researcher, young or old, must stay informed about the progress of his/her field. In the 20th century, the library was the researcher's best friend to stay informed. Most researchers spent some time regularly in the library to browse the table of contents of the new magazines and journals. Some companies even published special journals that contained abstracts of papers published in key journals. Current Contents was one of these journals.

The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is a proposal aiming at resolving some problem the Internet is facing today like the lack of inbound inter-domain traffic engineering or the continuous growth of the routing table.

The tutorials available on http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/tutorials/lisp-tutorial present LISP today

The IPv4 address space is becoming a scarce resource and the Internet Registries are working hard to reclaim unused IPv4 address blocks to be able to continue to allocate the requested address blocks. The 1.0.0.0/8 is one of the candidate address blocks to be used within the coming months, but network operators are a bit frightened by the fact that there are probably many networks that already use private addresses such as 1.2.3.4/32 or similar "simple IP addresses".

You frequently need to resolve IP addresses into their longest-match prefix? RADIX_UDP is for you ;-)

The tool loads a list of prefixes into a radix that can be queried in UDP. The syntax is simple, send a UDP segment in text with the first column being the IP, we don't care about the others ;-)

The server will reply with the same text but with the corresponding prefix prepended.

Example,

create a file "prefix.dat" with this content:

192.0.2.0/24
192.0.2.128/25

start the server:

./radix_udp prefix.dat 45005

query it

Since the early nineties, the Internet community has been concerned by the consumption of IPv4 addresses and several techniques have been proposed and deployed to reduce the consumption of IPv4 addresses. Network Address Translation (NAT) and Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR) have been very successful. Unfortunately, the pool of IPv4 addresses is finite and we will run out of IPv4 addresses soon.

Publié sous forme de carte blanche dans le journal Le Soir le 30 décembre 2009