Cisco Catalyst Switch for ExWest

I've finally aquired a proper switch for Exchange West.

A Cisco Catalyst 4006 with a bunch of FE ports and a couple of GBIC ports will be serving as Internet Exchange in Galway until the demand for something bigger or better arises. Yes, this beast is EoL, next year even EoS, but honestly, the service is going to be free on 100 mbit/s ports and will come with no SLA and no option to buy transit across the exchange.

I've also sourced a SuperVisor III engine for the beast, so that it's running IOS, has a 64 Gbps switching fabric and will forward 48-Mpps in hardware for both Layer 2 and Layer 3/4 traffic.

I reckon' it'll be a good start platform.

INEX Meeting, GBLX, various.

The INEX meeting in Dublin was on. I gave a talk on IPv6 deployment. The video for that can be found here.

It also looks like in the likes of the issues with GBLX, we're probably going to kill that session and get IPv6 from KPN instead. Global Crossing engineers have no understanding for, that rate-limiting ICMP in IPv6 simply is a no no. Even though they are saying, that they only are limiting the ICMPv6 traffic targeted for their router. It clearly affects us badly. How bad ? Check this out:



The gap that looks ok from the 23rd to the 24th is, when they shut the filter down after much arguing. However on the 24th, after we confirmed it is the filter, that is causing the issue, they just bloody turned it on again. Disregarding that the service is useless to us that way.

Mikrotik RouterOS 3.15 release

The release of ROS 3.15 yesterday fixed quite a few bugs, that affected us.

IPv6 and IPv4 address families can now co-exist on the same BGP session (routing-test). That means, if our testing goes well, we'll be announcing IPv6 routes on INEX Vlan#2, too, very soon.

BIOS 2.18 fixes the issue, where 2.17 was killing ether3 on RB600 and ether2 and 3 on RB500 series.

The issue, that one couldn't disable dns resolving on traceroutes was really annoying for diagnostics as well.

They however broke adding static IPv4 routes via WinBox instead :( and my own RB600 router went into a non-recoverable state during upgrade. Something I haven't seen in a very long time. Netinstall and reload of backup fixed that though.

GBLX IPv6 and eXpress peering live

Finally, it took ages to get the details for the Globalcrossing IPv6 and the eXpress peering sessions. But they are live now and we'll just have to wait for the eXpress route-servers to pick up our prefixes. That should happen in the next 24 hours.

All we are waiting on our circuit to PacketExchange is the session for IPv4 from Globalcrossing.

Anyhow, this means, that we have 3 IPv4 and 3 IPV6 transit carriers now.

INEX meeting, Dublin

Today was INEX meeting. As we're one of the newest members at the INEX, a presentation of the company was required, sort of. The talk can be found here. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to prepare it properly, it got hacked together the same morning, but well, very few people will notice the real hick-ups :).

INEX live

Both INEX connection are out of quarantine now and we're live. Just made it in July :)

INEX Quarantine fail

Yikes. Turns out, that the switches I've used are leaking their own MAC-addresses into all VLan's. That kicks us another 24 hours back on the schedule.

INEX Quarantine

Our X-connect has been setup and the quarantine process to be enabled on the two INEX ports has been initiated. We'll see how things go in the next 24 hours.

INEX membership

We got an email from the INEX team today, that our membership has been approved, so it's all downhill from here :)