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".

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

During the 1990s, most DNS resolvers were open, i.e. any host could send a query and obtain an answer from a DNS resolver and most of them handled recursive queries as well. Then, during the 2000s, open DNS resolvers suffered from more and more security problems and best current practices suggest that DNS resolvers that are installed inside company networks should only be accessed by the users of company and that requests from remote users would be blocked.

Google researchers have recently announced a new initiative called SPDY aimed at improving the performance of HTTP by reducing the delay between a HTTP request and a response. SPDY also allows to multiplex several requests over a single TCP connection. google intend to release a prototype implementation for a server and already has a chrome plugin.

Datacenters are now an emerging topic in the networking community and we can expect that more and more papers will develop techniques and protocols to solve problems inside data centers. A SIGMETRICS, Albert Greenberg gave an interesting tutorial on current datacenters design and some of the issues that they face.

In a recent presentation at the LADIS 2009 workshop, Jeff Dean, Google Fellow in Google's Systems Infrastructure Group, gave an interesting talk on the large scale distributed systems that are in use inside google. Although the presentation does not reveal trade secrets, it provides interesting hints about some of the issues that google is addressing and the size of their infrastructure.