Network interfaces are identified by a numeric interface index or an interface name. The definition of interface indexes and names goes back to the early days of SNMP, see for example RFC 1066 (published in 1988). In the late 1990s, a scoped address architecture was introduced by RFC 2373 (published in 1998), and with it came zone indexes and zone names, both were introduced in RFC 4007 (published in 2005).

The following email exchange took please end of March 2021 between me and someone who claimed to be be one of my bosses. (The name appearing below is a pseudonym in order to avoid any confusion with real persons.) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2021 01:42:01 -0700 From: David Gammas <onikutem.o@gmail.com> To: Juergen Schoenwaelder <j.schoenwaelder@jacobs-university.de> Subject: I need a help, email me back asap Regards, Prof. Dr. David Gammas Dean Sent from Iphone The email looked a bit odd to me (no subject line, email coming from an unknown @gmail.

There are several attempts to record the history of networking or more specifically the Internet. One of these efforts is run by Russ White, who is conducting interviews with people that have contributed to the networking history.

People often have strong opinions about programming languages and so do I. Well, perhaps a bit less strong than others. Yesterday I took a moment to reflect about the things I liked and disliked through my journey with different languages. I started to write things down, and I decided to share my notes. This likely has little value for anyone, do not expect any deep insights here. BASIC (late 1970s) I first touched what we call a “computer” these days in the late 70s.

It is perhaps a side effect of getting older that I spent more and more time on administrative issues and as a consequence I interact more frequently with people working in administrative offices. The more I get to see how they work, the more I am realizing how strange computer scientists are. One of the first rules they seem to learn in business administration is that everything can be made to fit into a two-dimensional table.

Introduction The YANG data modeling language [RFC7950] and the associated protocols NETCONF [RFC6241] and RESTCONF [RFC8040] use a naming scheme that essentially consists of tuples of the form (module, path). The tuple (ietf-system, /system/contact) is an example uniquely identifying the leaf /system/contact in the YANG data tree of the module ietf-system. (The module may be identified by the module name or a module namespace but since there is 1:1 mapping between the two, the difference is not relevant for the discussion here and we simply use the module name.

While reading Geoff Huston’s excellent article “DNS Privacy and the IETF” (Internet Protocol Journal 22(5), July 2019), I came across the term ‘surveillance capitalism’, coined by Shoshana Zuboff (Harvard Business School in Cambridge).

The software crisis in the late 1960 and early 1970s was driven by the challenge of creating useful and efficient computer programs in a planned engineering process, that is in a well defined amount of time and with predictable costs. Software engineering has evolved as a discipline since then and we have far better tools and techniques in place today for a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.

I just read (again) Henning Schulzrinne’s reflections about where computer networking research stands in the middle years, titled “Networking research — A reflection in the middle years”. I may not agree with everything said in the paper but there is a lot of very good insight and truth in Henning’s paper.

I have attended a seminar discussing how to encourage reproducability in scientific research of the Internet. Obviously, everybody agrees that it is desirable that research findings are reproduced by independent studies (and I mean reproduced and not just repeated although repeated is more than nothing). The question, however, is how to get there. For me this is largely an issue of incentives and I am sure there are a couple of things that can be done to increase incentives to reproduce research.