Sentinel View 1.0 Release

Highly anticipated release of Sentinel Viev have come to life. It wasn’t a breeze due to issues with time-expensive database queries. The upgrade was conducted in spirit of optimizing the ever-growing database. Although Martin Prudek, the author of major changes is not part of the team, his effort left everlasting mark on the project. Another former colleague, Vojta Myslivec, have been unforgettable helping hand in regard to the database end and it’s improvement.

BIRD Journey to Threads. Chapter 3½: Route server performance

All the work on multithreading shall be justified by performance improvements. This chapter tries to compare times reached by version 3.0-alpha0 and 2.0.8, showing some data and thinking about them.

BIRD is a fast, robust and memory-efficient routing daemon designed and implemented at the end of 20th century. We’re doing a significant amount of BIRD’s internal structure changes to make it run in multiple threads in parallel.

BIRD Journey to Threads. Chapter 3: Parallel execution and message passing.

Parallel execution in BIRD uses an underlying mechanism of dedicated IO loops and hierarchical locks. The original event scheduling module has been converted to do message passing in multithreaded environment. These mechanisms are crucial for understanding what happens inside BIRD and how its internal API changes.

BIRD is a fast, robust and memory-efficient routing daemon designed and implemented at the end of 20th century. We’re doing a significant amount of BIRD’s internal structure changes to make it run in multiple threads in parallel.

New Statistics – What’s under the Hood?

CZ.NIC has quite a long tradition of acquiring, processing and publishing data about the operation of authoritative DNS servers, public resolver ODVR, CZ domain register and mojeID service. Whilst previous (and still active) web pages with statistics offered many graphs and extensive options for setting their parameters, they tended to evoke the refrain from the popular Czech song by Zdeněk Svěrák and Jaroslav Uhlíř: “Statistics is boring, albeit having valuable data …”. One of very few positive outcomes of the covid pandemic was, thanks to the efforts of Johns Hopkins University and many other institutions, a considerably raised standard of statistical visualisations that our old statistics certainly don’t fulfil.

Survey results: DNS resolvers’ configuration

Contemporary DNS software is very complex. Vendors and development teams lack feedback about the features that are actually in use. Our survey aimed to obtain such information from users. The results are described in this article. Users and administrators of DNS resolvers from any vendor were invited to participate in this survey. This post follows the article “Survey: How do you configure DNS resolvers?”.

On October 25, we will try to turn off IPv6 transition technologies Teredo and 6to4

In 2018, in my article Phasing out IPv6 transition technologies, I brought information about the current development and use of Teredo and 6to4 technologies. In conclusion, I informed that Teredo prefix 2001::/32 is no longer promoted to foreign upstreams, but only within NIX.CZ and NIX.SK peering nodes, where global peers are active as well, so we did not limit the 6to4 technology due to certain traffic from abroad. In this blogpost, I will explain why we now want to turn off these two technologies.

BIRD Journey to Threads. Chapter 2: Asynchronous route export

Route export is a core algorithm of BIRD. This chapter covers how we are making this procedure multithreaded. Desired outcomes are mostly lower latency of route import, flap dampening and also faster route processing in large configurations with lots of export from one table.