Last week I had the privilege of attending RIPE65, meeting a bunch of extremely bright SP engineers, and listening to a few fantastic presentations (full meeting report @ RIPE65 web site).

I knew Geoff Huston would have a great presentation, but his QoS presentation was even better than I expected. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he said, but every vendor peddling QoS should be forced to listen to his explanation of the underlying problems and kludgy solutions first.

His other presentation described (lack of) DNSSEC resolvers. If nothing else, watch it for the hilarious comments he was making.

As expected, there was plenty of IPv6-related content:

• Lorenzo Colliti describing the results of the World IPv6 Launch (and dirty tricks some broken service providers were using to get off the radar);
• Eric Vyncke explaining the IPv6 layer-2 security problems and countermeasures;
• Nick Hillard having an IPv6 Real-Time Blackholing tutorial;
• Mark Townsley talking about stateless PAT (yes, we do have a round square after all);
• Andy Davidson presenting an idealistic view of why NAT64 should win.

Not surprisingly, everyone describing their real-life experience in the IPv6 working group was talking about low-cost CPE problems, but there’s a lot of silver lining: RIPE did a CPE survey with encouraging results and Ondrej Filip from Czech NIC presented actual test results available on-line in their Catalogue of IPv6 routers.

Finally, we got a glimpse of an idea so secret we never got the slides it took more than a week to publish the slides: Jen Linkova from Google is using MPLS in a most creative way to measure the WAN network forwarding behavior. That’s all I’m going to say right now – watch her presentation and figure out what she’s doing.