Just let IPv4 run out. It’s over. Just get on with it.

So, I’m currently at the RIPE 63 meeting in Vienna. Obviously, one of the ongoing hot topics here is IPv4 depletion, at times consisting of discussion on either a) the transition away from IPv4 to IPv6 via various transition mechanisms, and b) how to make the pitiful amount of IPv4 addressing that’s left last as long as possible.

One of the things that is often said about (b) is that it shouldn’t be done to death, IPv4 should just be allowed to run out, we get over it, and deploy IPv6. However (b) behaviour is to be expected when dealing with exhaustion of a finite resource.

There are similarities and parallels to be drawn between IPv4 runout and IPv6 adoption, fossil fuel depletion and movement to alternative energy techologies. The early adopters and the laggards. The hoarders and speculators. The evangelists and the naysayers.

So, for a minute don’t think about oil and gas resources being depleted, that’s way in the future. We’re facing one of the first examples of exhaustion of a finite resource on which businesses and economies depend.

If the IPv4 depletion and IPv6 (slow) adoption situation is a dry run of what might actually happen when something like oil runs out, then we should be worried, because we can’t just rely on carrier grade NAT to save us.

Latest Datacentre Expansion in Leeds

The Yorkshire Evening Post carried a story today about the future of the former Tetley’s Brewery site in Leeds, which closed back in June.

Leeds-based Internet and Telephony Services company aql have announced they are part of a consortium who wants to redevelop part of the site, to include more new co-location space, complementing their nearby redevelopment of the historic Salem Church, another Leeds landmark being saved from dereliction.

This also good news for the rapidly developing Leeds-based IXP – IXLeeds, who’s switch is co-located at the aql Salem Church facility. It opens up further access to co-location for the future, and further promotes technology growth in the region.

Old brewery buildings make good bases for something such as co-location, due to the buildings being engineered for high floor loadings. Part of the old Truman Brewery site on London’s Brick Lane was reborn as a datacentre some years ago, so there’s a sound precedent for this part of the redvelopment.

Adam Beaumont, aql founder, said that he’s “always looking for new ways to combine his interests of technology and beer” :).

This new plan deserves to go ahead for a number of reasons, and not only because it is significantly better than Carlsberg’s original proposal: To build a car park, locally dubbed as “Probably the most unadventurous redevelopment plan in the world“. Hilarious.

More specifics driving traffic to transit?

Interesting talk at RIPE 63 in Vienna today from Fredy Kuenzler of the Swiss network Init7 – How more specifics increase your transit bill (video transcript).

It proposes that although you may peer with directly with a network, any more specific prefixes or deaggregated routes which they announce to their upstream transit provider will eventually reach you, and circumvent the direct peering. If this forces traffic to your transit provider, it costs you money per meg, rather than it being covered in your (usually flat) cost of peering.

Of course, if it’s the one transit provider in the middle, they are getting to double-dip – being paid twice (once on each side) for the same traffic! Nice if you can get it!

So, the question is, how to find these more specific routes mark them as unattractive and not install them in your Forwarding Table, preferring the peered route, and saving you money.

Geoff Huston suggests he could provide a feed or a list of the duplicate more specific routes, crunching this sort of thing is something he’s been doing for ages with BGP routing data, such as the CIDR Report.

But the question remains how to take these routes and either a) keep them in the table, but deprefer the more specific which breaks a fundamental piece of decision making in BGP processing, or b) filter them out entirely, without affecting redundancy if the direct peering fails for any reason.

I started out being too simplistic, but hmm… having a think about this one…

Virgin Atlantic launches “all new” Economy service

I saw that Virgin Atlantic have today launched a new Economy inflight service – their “best ever”, so they say. There is a shiny video online.

 

Call me a sceptic that belongs in an episode of “Grumpy Old Men“, but I can’t really see much from the promotional video that makes me think “Wow”:

  • The branding and packaging has changed – all part of marketing the product to the customer
  • It still features that kiddies’ tea party sized “mini-loaf” of bread that I remember from my first VS flight years ago
  • It still contains some classic Virgin touches like mid-flight ice-cream, now served from a cutesy usherette tray
  • The coffee/tea cups seem smaller than before, but serving dessert with coffee/tea seems a good move, having eaten my dessert and then waited ages for coffee.
  • The menu cards have returned (Virgin took them away early in the 2000’s as a cost-cutting measure)
  • Is the new lightweight tray, with it’s little indentations, meant to remind you of being at primary school?
  • Along with the new space-saving and lighter tray, there seems to be a reduction in some pre-packaged optional items, which is a plus – ever thought about how many packets of unasked for sugar airlines throw away each year?
  • But, they still use those woeful “Dairystix” pre-packed milk tubes – a triumph of packaging design that allows you to spill weird-tasting milk over your neighbour or, if you’re really unlucky, yourself. What about a milk jug?
  • It looks like afternoon tea-type second services are making a comeback, having been heavily pared back in the last decade.
  • But the vtravelled blog article says that “on shorter flights, you will get a light meal like high-tea” – does that mean no main meal at all on some sectors?
  • We don’t get to see what’s inside the shiny new packages – is it still the same iffy food that was always there before?

It’s good to see Virgin reinstating some elements of the service which were taken away in cuts of the last decade, and the weight-saving and waste-reducing features deserve applauding, but “all new” and “best ever” seems to be on the verge of overstating things. If they really meant to show how good this new service was, perhaps they wouldn’t be afraid to show us what we could expect inside the boxes.

Unless it really is yet another watery, drippy, lasagne, (or the ever dreary, ever present anaemic sausage and cement mash) in which case I wouldn’t blame them at all.

Postscript:

About an hour or two after publishing this blog post, I got the following email from Virgin Atlantic…

We’d like your feedback

Dear Customer,

In an effort to better understand our customers and improve our services at Virgin Atlantic, we are seeking to gain feedback about our customers’ use of social networking sites, particularly Facebook and Twitter.

To help us obtain this feedback, please click on the link below and fill in this survey.

So, someone or something is watching, somewhere 🙂

Couldn’t go with the Openflow? Archive is online.

Last week, I missed an event I really wanted to make it to – the OpenFlow Symposium, hosted by PacketPushers and Tech Field Day. Just too much on (like the LONAP AGM), already done a fair bit of travel recently (NANOG, DECIX Customer Forum, RIPE 63), and couldn’t be away from home yet again. I managed to catch less than 30 minutes of the webcast.

From being something which initially seemed to be aimed at academia doing protocol development, lots of people are now talking about OpenFlow as it has attracted some funding, and more interest from folks with practical uses.

I think it’s potentially interesting for either centralised control plane management (almost a bit like a route reflector or a route server for BGP), or for implementing support for new protocols which are really unlikely to make it into silicon any time soon, as well as the originally intended purpose of protocol development and testing against production traffic and hardware.

Good news for folks such as myself is that some of the stream content is now being archived online, so I’m looking forward to catching up with proceedings.

A comfy Economy seat? Surely not!

Okay, did that get your attention?

I’m currently in Vienna for a meeting, and to get here, rather than trek from home to Heathrow (about 75-90 mins) for a direct flight, I went LCY-ZRH-VIE on Swiss, given I only live 20 minutes on public transport from London City.

The flight from Zurich to Vienna was on a fairly new looking A320, which had a new style of seat that I hadn’t come across before. Like the last Swiss short-haul “space saver” seats, they were made by Recaro, still gave the impression of plenty of room, but definitely addressed one of the niggles on the older seat, which was the crap seat-back storage net.

One thing I noticed very quickly was how firm and thin-looking the seat bottom cushioning was, but at the same time, that it was quite comfortable.

I then realised that underneath the leather covering, it was a mesh-type “suspension” seat, like you might expect to find in an office or work chair, rather than the traditional foam padding. It was only a short flight, but I found it much more comfortable and supportive than a foam cushion. With a normal foam cushion, once it’s compressed, that’s it, it somewhat ceases to be supportive. The mesh doesn’t give way like this, and provided comfortable support behind the knees as well.

Not sure about what it’s like on a longer flight, but I know people who spend hours sat in Aeron chairs, so maybe I’ll ask them. Or does anyone know if Swiss have tried these new seat bottom cushions on their longhaul fleet?

Of course, it probably also weighs less than the equivalent foam padding.

All rather clever really.

The $16 muffin outrage!

While it’s last weeks news, it’s still making me laugh a week later, so I thought I’d blog about it…

There was outrage that the US Justice Department paid $16 a muffin (and $10 a cookie) as part of the catering for a legal conference held at a hotel near the White House.

Anyone involved in organising conferences knows that hotels want to make a certain amount of money from a conference, which you can pretty much express in this simultaneous equation:

Income = Meeting Room Hire + AV + Catering + Hotel Rooms

Thought of simplistically, the hotels income breaks down roughly as fixed costs, such as the hotel’s overheads, the cost of consumables for the event, such as coffee and food, the costs of hiring anything special in for the event (such as AV the hotel can’t provide in-house, or additional casual staff), and a chunk of profit.

So, you can end up with a situation whereby if someone doesn’t negotiate hard enough, and not enough people stay in the hotel, the coffee and muffins become very expensive.

Whither (UK) Regional Peering – Pt 2

It’s been a long while since I’ve blogged about this topic

Probably too long, as IXLeeds, something which inspired me to write Pt 1, is now a fully-fledged IX, not just a couple of networks plugged into a switch in a co-lo (all IXPs have to start somewhere!), but has formed a company, with directors, with about 12 active participants connected to its switch. Hurrah!

So, trying to pick up where I left off; in this post, I’m going to talk about shared fate, with respect to Internet Exchanges.

What do I mean by shared fate? Continue reading “Whither (UK) Regional Peering – Pt 2”

15 Years of INEX, me one year on

There were two anniversaries last week. The first was the 15th Birthday of INEX – the Internet Exchange Point in Dublin. To celebrate this, they organised a rather good event at Dublin’s history-steeped Mansion House (the first Dáil sat there in 1919) complete with distinguished speakers such as Dan Kaminsky and Geoff Huston, and a rather good dinner from the adjoining Fire Restaurant.

It was also Arthur’s Day, another excuse to drink copious quantities of the black stuff. Coincidence? You decide…

Dan spoke for over an hour, including Q&A, with no slides, no sheaf of notes, just this interesting stream of consciousness that made you want to sit up and listen.

Some things that Dan said got me thinking, not least the comment that “The world’s social life is being run from Silicon Valley”, and more to the point by a bunch of nerds (e.g. Facebook, G+, etc.), maybe some of the most anthrophobic people you might find! This linked up with some other stuff I’d been reading.

So I thought I’d try and make sense of what was going through my mind. Continue reading “15 Years of INEX, me one year on”