e-Net Fiber being pulled in

We decided to move the fiber from Dangan across town to Mervue and also, we're going to light our own dark fiber in Galway. It'll also more than double our bandwidth to Dublin.

The drop connection for that is finally being pulled today, pictures will follow.

The beauty of it all is, that no civils are needed, because we can pull it through existing ducting in the cable-riser of the neighbor building (owned by the same landlord). That way we're ensured, that we've got entirely different paths.

Obviously, this fiber trunk is also on a completely different fiber ring and connection to Dublin from the BT fiber, that already is in Mervue.

Out for GBLX

I've finally had it with Global Crossing. At least 4 issues in the last 6 months, first the incompetence to rate-limit ND/NS ICMPv6 traffic and I had to stick their nose at it, then several times with lost routing, where the routes weren't dropped.

Tonight again, routing lost, BGP routes are still there, but I had to clear the session manually get all back to normal.

All of that I might be able to live with, if the support was decent, but they are a complete nightmare. Also on April 27th the latency on both our IPv4 and IPv6 circuits went to pot. A consistant increase by 40-60 ms is not something i call Tier1 carrier grade Internet.

We've already advised our Layer2 provider to kill the session with GBLX and we're going to replace it with KPN instead. Hopefully that'll prove to be a lot better.

PIv6 again

Looks like, I was the first in the RIPE region to request PIv6 space and get it assigned.

The changes in the way PI IP space is handled make it slightly more hassleful: beyond the business registration, a LIR contract is needed now, because PI is charged for as of recently.

It's good, that this gap (the lack of PI for IPv6) finally is closed. Some companies made this a requirement to even consider to move to IPv6.

PIv6 (Provider Independant IPv6 adressing space)

Finally, RIPE announced, that provider independant IPv6 now is available for request. I've been waiting for this a long time.

Quagga BGP crash

Our Dublin BGP router just died this morning. It looks like, that there is a bug, that causes Quagga (0.99.10 and as it seems 0.99.11) to crash, when it receives a 32-bit ASN in the as-path on certain peering sessions.

A post to the users list confirmed very quickly, that it was a bug and it wasn't an isolated incident, a work-around was found, implemented and we got things quickly back up and running.

Luckily, our BGP feeds are split over the Galway and Dublin BGP servers, so nobody really noticed.

Netflow analysis

It gets more and more interesting for us to determine, where our users pull their traffic from etc., also to determine what Internet Exchanges we should connect to next, like LINX, AMS-IX or DE-CIX ?

For that purpose, we've got a trial for IBM Aurora, the Quagga BGP gateways have been installed with pmacct netflow probes a while ago. I had tested various open source solution for analysis, but wasn't quite happy with the result. ntop was working quite ok, but Aurora beats all of them. Obviously it's a commercial solution.

Company goes Twitter

I've added a Twitter account (apart from a personal one) for network updates and outages, so that people can follow, what's going on.

I know, there are a few out there, that will appreciate it.