KPN in / GBLX out

The GBLX saga ends. With plenty off issues over the last year, we've shut the BGP down now and replaced it with IP transit from KPN.

Bringing the session with KPN (both v4/v6) online was comparable painless and so far, it's been flawless.

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.

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.

Routers for NAT-PT and other services

I've ordered two Cisco routers.

One is thought as NAT-PT gateway, so that we'll be able to provide a IPv6-only service. The Linux implementation of NAT-PT isn't quite the best and the older Cisco boxes go dead cheap on eBay currently.

The other routers purpose is not fully determined yet. I might use it as 6to4 gateway, depending on what throughput it delivers or for testing.

Cisco Catalyst

We've recently bought a couple of older Cisco Catalyst switches and replaced the Dell switches in the network.

First of all, the Cisco switches are more flexible and some of them even do Layer3 services, like BGP. So on top of the Catalyst 4006 for ExWest, we've got one of them in TeleCity and one in Mervue.

The changeover was done last week and things seem to be running pretty good. I'm just left with replacing the switches in remote sites like Abbeyknockmoy etc.

The reason for replacing the old switches is, that once in a while, when the VLan configuration is committed, the darn things just go daft and drop everything. All that is left then is to drive on site and powercycle the switch. Not something you really want to do, when the switch is 60-70 km's away.

Another switch that had to go is the Linksys Enterprise switch, because it's just a PAIN to having to find a Windows box, just to configure the Vlans. The switch's webinterface only works in IE and you can't configure Vlan's via SSH or telnet. How daft is that ?

Also our INEX Lan#2 peering are handed by the Catalyst in Dublin now. No major box needed there currently and we can upgrade as we go.