Possible Comcast Packet Loss Between Atlanta and Chandler, Az
I suspect random packet loss between an Xfinity (Comcast) cable modem user in Atlanta, and our Chandler, Az data center. Traceroute between the Atlanta user and Chandler shows Comcast/TW backbone handing off to Abovenet/Zayo, finally to Internap for local loop connection. Can anyone verify this? David
Cox in Omaha blackhole routing to Level 3
Can someone from Cox reply to me offline regarding a Cox routing issue in Omaha? Both ends of connection are on Cox network, but a traceroute shows packets being routed into Level 3 at 4.35.186.61 24 msec 24 msec 24 msec, and blackholed in Level 3 network. David Holmes
ATT-Level 3 Peering
We're seeing frequent dropped packets between ATT and Level 3 in Atlanta with traffic sourced from an ATT user destined for Microsoft Office 365, making Office 365 apps unusable during critical business hours. Anyone else have this problem with ATT?
Internet Slow in Marina Del Rey, California
Sluggish Internet via TWC and Sprint 3G/4G in Marina Del Rey area. Any outages reported? Regards, David
liveaction qos configurator
Any comments on live action Cisco qos configurator would be appreciated Regards David
Re: 48V DC Terminal server recommendations
We have used the Avocent console/power terminal servers for several years. Although the browser interface is cluttered, and the use of Java sometimes poses connectivity challengesm Avocent is a useful console server for all types of devices, and has the ability to remotely power-cycle AC and DC devices. Avocent devices meet your specs (-48V PS, NEBS compliance). Regards, David On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 7:59 AM, Jeremy Bresley b...@brezworks.com wrote: Looking for recommendations on a good terminal server to put into a telco colocate facility. Requirements: 8-16 ports for Cisco console access (RJ-45s preferred, DB9s if we have to) -48V DC power USB/internal modem for OOB access NEBS Level 1 (or better) compliance. So far I've found Perle has several models that meet 3 out of 4, but none that meet all the requirements. The only OpenGear boxes we're seeing with DC power is a little 4 port unit and they don't mention NEBS compliance. Lantronix mentions DC power for their SLC line, but doesn't mention anything about NEBS compliance either. Anybody have any recommendations for one they've used that meets all 4 of those requirements? Thanks! Jeremy TheBrez Bresley b...@brezworks.com
Re: recommended outdoor enclosures
I have had success with the opposite approach using equipment rated from -40 C to +85 C (+185 F), no fans, sealed NEMA4 or NEMA12 Hoffman enclosures, cooling by equipment heat sinks. Ethernet switches and optics rated -40 C to +85 C This configuration has worked with the same equipment for at least 6 years in an environment where summer ambient temperatures reach 120-130 F, and winter ambient 0 F. Hoffman makes a 72 high NEMA12 enclosure with a swing-out 19 telco rack. On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:36 PM, Chuck Anderson c...@wpi.edu wrote: I'm in need of my first free-standing, pad-mounted outdoor enclosure, 19 rack rails, 12-18 rack units, with about 400W of heat load inside, for use in the Massachusetts climate. What do people recommend as far as contruction, cooling/heating options, NEMA ratings, security options, etc. for this use? I was hoping to keep the inside temperature between 50 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, although my worst-case components are rated for 41 to 104 F (4 - 40 C). If a full mechanical A/C system can be avoided, even better. A thermo-electric cooler would be nice. Thanks.
Re: huawei (ZTE too)
Apologies for making what could be construed as an off topic, political comment, but doesn't everyone in the USA know by now that the PRC represents a dagger aimed at the economic and national security of America? A military invasion in slow motion as it were? David On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Bryan Fields br...@bryanfields.netwrote: On 6/13/13 1:35 PM, Warren Bailey wrote: They are a state controlled company. You think the PRC's party members dont call the shots? I've been to Beijing for work.. I can assure you the government has a very known presence through the private community. Often times, graduates of their state run colleges enter the private sector to help their collective needs. China is an odd place, but in my opinion often they are underestimated. Look at their stealth plane, that's a good starting point on their ability to borrow technology and implement it quickly. It's about numbers over there, not sense. My objection to ZTE/Hauwei when I was at a cellular telco was just this. I said there was no way I can agree with Chinese nationals having unfettered access to our network. Sure the CLI was crap/nonexistent and full of bugs, but I never thought the product was phoning home. I assumed there was a backdoor, like every other product and this was dealt with via ACL's and bastion boxes. I did not think highly of the product, and did not want to select it. However ZTE made the offer to put 6 support engineers in our main switch office 24/7 for the first year, and open an office down the street. Our SVP creamed himself over this level of support and they got the contract. It's an awesome idea, build gear that's cheap enough you can't say no to, and use the support personnel as spies. It provides a perfect cover story to cycle in loads of engineers. Only one or two does the support, the rest can observe/record/share the internal details of everything they see. They are playing our love of But Wait There's More!. Give us everything at deep discounts or for free and receive direct access to the core of every major telecom company on the planet. For a few hundred million dollars the Chinese government has intelligence on anyone or anything world wide, and their agents are welcomed with open arms. -- Bryan Fields 727-409-1194 - Voice 727-214-2508 - Fax http://bryanfields.net
Re: huawei (ZTE too)
Last I heard NANOG stands for North American Network Operators Group. Anti-American comments are not welcome here.. David On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Jeroen Massar jer...@massar.ch wrote: On 2013-06-13 13:01, david peahi wrote: Apologies for making what could be construed as an off topic, political comment, but doesn't everyone in the USA know by now that the PRC represents a dagger aimed at the economic and national security of America? A military invasion in slow motion as it were? Please realize that one can make that statement from every side of the fence. It all just depends on which side of the fence you are born, if you consider one thing good or evil and as recent events show, you should be looking a bit closer at the home base... And now after this whole flood of messages about this... lets please go back to operations, thanks! Greets, Jeroen
Micro Trenching for Fiber Optic Deployment
Does anyone have experience in running fiber optic cable with micro-trenching techniques in areas where there is no existing asphalt or concrete roadway, just packed earth and rock? Environmental limitations do not allow for constructing an aerial power pole alignment, or underground ductbank. The distance is about 10 kM. David
Re: Metro Ethernet, VPLS clarifications
The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) develops standards for Metro Ethernet, which are generally implemented by telcos/cablecos. See the following link: http://metroethernetforum.org/ The 2 biggest problems I have found with telco/cableco MEF services are: 1. In network configurations where all sites are relatively close together ( 500 miles), the telco/cableco SLAs are meaningless, bordering on being fraudulent. For instance SLAs of 50 ms round trip for bronze service, and 20 ms for gold service are enough network transit time to send packets 5000 miles and 2000 miles respectively. This is like buying homeowners' insurance on a $500K house with a $10 million deductible (50 ms SLA), and a more expensive policy has a $5 million deductible (20 ms SLA). 2. The MEF spec does not address directed multicast, as opposed to a native Ethernet switched network which updates the mac tables with each next hop for the multicast requestor (video for instance) tracking the Layer 3 multicast routing protocol shortest path. So in MEF implementations where users view a constant 10 Mbps (for example) multicast video stream between a requestor and a multicast source, this 10 Mbps gets broadcast out all switch ports in a users' MEF VLAN, rendering low speed MEF connections at all other users' locations useless. David On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:54 PM, Abzal Sembay serian@gmail.com wrote: 05.02.2013 19:58, Scott Helms ?: Metro-Ethernet is generally the term used to describe Ethernet used as a WAN connection or as a point to point connection. There was at one time the concept of a MAN (Metro Area Network) but metro ethernet is now available in more scenarios than that described. The connectivity can be over fiber or copper and the speed delivered can be as low as a few mbps but commercially available offerings normally start at 5-10 mbps. On the high end its possible to get gigabit and faster connections in certain areas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Metro_Ehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_E VPLS stands for Virtual Private Lan Services. This an umbrella technology that allows for the bridging of layer 2 traffic across various layer 2 3 networks. This is generally used as a replacement for a point to point metro ethernet (or other) connection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**VPLS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPLS On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 11:06 PM, Abzal Sembay serian@gmail.commailto: serian@gmail.com wrote: Hi experts, I need some clarifications on these terms. Could somebody give explanations or share some links? When and how are these technologies used? Thanks in advance. -- Regards, Abzal -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 --**-- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --**-- Thank you, Scott and all of you for your answers and time. From my understanding M-Ethernet is a some kind of service. Standartized technology that allows to connect multiple different networks. And it is independent from physical and datalink layers. And nowadays which tecnology is the most used(VPLS or Metro)? What about MPLS? Sorry I'm a little confused. I really want to understand. -- Regards, Abzal
Re: Muni fiber: L1 or L2?
Perhaps I missed a reference to receiver sensitivity in this thread. Since the receiver optical-electric components are binary in nature, received optical dB only has to be equal to or greater than the receiver's sensitivity. Low or high dB received light produces the same quality at the receiver. Thus, dB loss can be extensive due to factors such as attenuation, splices, dispersal, but as long as the received dB level is equal to the receiver sensitivity, it doesn't matter how much launched dB is lost. Is the point that splitters reduce the effective distance from the launch point in the PON architecture? David On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Owen DeLong o...@delong.com wrote: On Feb 1, 2013, at 14:17 , Jean-Francois Mezei jfmezei_na...@vaxination.ca wrote: On 13-02-01 16:03, Jason Baugher wrote: The reason to push splitters towards the customer end is financial, not technical. It also has to do with existing fibre infrastructure. If a Telco has already adopted a fibre to a node philosophy, then it has a;ready installed a limited number of strands between CO and many neighbouhoods. Since the discussion here is about muni fiber capabilities and ideal greenfield plant designs, existing fiber is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It makes sense to standardise on one technology. And if that technology, because it is used by many, ends up much cheaper due to economies of scale, it makes sense to adopt it. Only if you're a single vendor looking to provide a single-vendor solution. That's really not what this conversation is about, IMHO. In fact, that's a pretty good summary of the situation we're trying to fix. And remember that it isn't just the cable. You need to consider the OLT cards. An OLT card can often support a few GPON systems each passing 32 homes. Not sure why this matters... With 1 strand per home, you take up one port per home served. (possibly per home passed depending on deployment philosophy). So you end up needing far more cards in an OLT to serve the same number of people. More $$$ needed. Uh, no... That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about still using splitters, but, putting the splitter next to the OLT instead of near the ONT end. That's all. GPON isn't suited for trunks. But for last mile, is it really so bad ? Yes... Because... 2.mumble gpbs of capacity for 32 homes yields 62mbps of sustained download for each home. (assuming you have 32 homes conected and using it at same time) Great by todays standards, but likely to be obsoleted within 10 years. Given the nearly 100 year old nature of some copper plants, I'd like to see us start building fiber plants in a way that doesn't lock us into a particular technology choice constrained to the economic tradeoffs that are relevant today and may be completely different in as little as 5 years. If you have multicast and everyone is watching superbowl at same time, you're talking up very little bandwidth on that 2.mumble GPON link. Meh. Since everyone seems to want to be able to pause, rewind, etc., multicast doesn't tend to happen so much even in the IPTV world these days. Owen
Re: Muni fiber: L1 or L2?
Technically, any of the architectures espoused by some of the commentators on this thread will work, and would at least be an order of magnitude better than what is available in the local loop today. One of the commentators, however, did underscore the biggest challenge by far to national broadband. (Even the watered down version consisting of a welter of autonomous municipal networks as is the subject of this thread). And that challenge is the stranglehold that incumbent telcos have on the local loop, and their caustic, anti-progress influence in City Halls, Sate Legislatures, and Washington DC. That is why the Australian NBN serves as a good example of how to wrest control of the local loop plant away from the telcos. In many areas of the US a parallel fiber network is already in place, built out by the Federal School Lunch e-rate program. Here, regrettably, the telcos have exerted their caustic influence by compelling legislators to allow only school and library traffic on the e-rate fiber. As far as a purely technical solution, in my own experience some years ago I worked in the entertainment business in the Burbank/Glendale, Ca. area. Both cites, led by the visionary Burbank Department of Water and Power, built out dark fiber networks. Of course, getting municipal fiber in Glendale required an intense struggle with the incumbent telco, which sent a representative to every city council meeting arguing that municipal fiber was bad for the city residents. David On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Leo Bicknell bickn...@ufp.org wrote: In a message written on Sat, Feb 02, 2013 at 09:28:06PM -0500, Scott Helms wrote: I'm not saying that you have to, but that's the most efficient and resilient (both of those are important right?) way of arranging the gear. The exact loop length from the shelves to the end users is up to you and in certain circumstances (generally really compact areas) you can simply home run everyone. Most muni networks don't look that way though because while town centers are generally compact where people (especially the better subdivisions) live is away from the center of town in the US. I can't give you a lot insight on your specific area since I don't know it, but those are the general rules. If the goal is the minimize the capital outlay of a greenfield build, your model can be more efficient, depending on the geography covered. Basically you're assuming that the active electronics to make a ring are cheaper than building high count fiber back to a central point. There are geographies where that is both true, and not true. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're model is cheaper for a majority of builds. On the other hand, I am not nearly as interested in minimizing the up front capital cost. It's an issue, sure, but I care much more about the total lifecycle cost. I'd rather spend 20% more up front to end up with 20-80% lower costs over 50 years. My argument is not that high count fiber back to a central location is cheaper in absolute, up front dollars, but that it's at worst a minimal amount more and will have neglegable additonal cost over a 40-80 year service life. By contrast, the ring topology you suggest may be slightly less expensive up front, but will require the active parts that make up the ring to be swapped out every 7-20 years. I believe that will lead to greater lifecycle cost; and almost importantly impeed development of new services as the existing gear ends up incompatable with newer technologies. -- Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Re: Will wholesale-only muni actually bring the boys to your yard?
The Australian NBN plan evolved because, when the Australian government put out the original RFP, the incumbent telcos wanted anti-competitive commitments in exchange for their build-out efforts (sound familiar here in the USA?). The Australian government deemed the original telco RFP replies as non-responsive, and withdrew the RFP, deciding that only the Australian government could build out a national network with broadband local loops to every residence and business. The Australian wholesale model opens the NBN to competitive market forces, as the wholesaled bandwidth costs are the same for all ISPs. So the plan is to make the ISPs compete on customer service features, let the marketplace decide as it were, as they would all have the same wholesale bandwidth charges. For those that argue that a national government plan would never work in the USA, the interstate highway system, and the modern commercial Internet itself refute that argument. The modern Internet was created by the Federal High Speed Computing and Communications Act of 1991, and the original build-out was directed by the National Science Foundation under the management of the White House Office of Technology. Once the commercial Internet was established, it was turned over to the telcos in 1993. The Australian NBN also has plans to possibly turn the network over to private hands once the build-out is established. And the muni build-out model, where a hodge podge of local networks are somehow coordinated such that all residences and businesses are connected, nationwide, at the same price and speed, just will not work. Building from the bottom up is not how today's commercial Internet backbone was created. David On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Jean-Francois Mezei jfmezei_na...@vaxination.ca It is in fact important for a government (municipal, state/privince or federal) to stay at a last mile layer 2 service with no retail offering. Wholesale only. Not only is the last mile competitively neutral because it is not involved in retail, but it them invites competition by allowing many service providers to provide retail services over the last mile network. This, Jean-Francois, is the assertion I hear relatively frequently. It rings true to me, in general, and I would go that way... but there is a sting in that tail: Can I reasonably expect that Road Runner will in fact be technically equipped and inclined to meet me to get my residents as subscribers? Especially if they're already built HFC in much to all of my municipality? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
Re: Looking for success stories in Qwest/Centurylink land
My experience with one of the big 2 telcos in the USA is unbelievable even now looking back a few months: 1. at my key network monitoring site telco Northern Telecom (before NT changed their name to Nortel) SONET equipment circa 1995 kept failing, taking legacy circuits down hard. 2. Escalating the problem to the account team resulted in their maintaining that there were no SONET alarms at the telco monitoring site, so nothing could be done. 3. At the 4th SONET outage, the telco discovered that the Northern Telecom alarm component had failed which explained why there were no alarms for the previous outages. 4. Despite all of the outages to a key location, the telco took 8 months to replace the NT equipment with modern MSPP equipment. During job walks with the telco, the telco OSP engineers insisted that the NT equipment was still good since it is still working, and tried to talk me out of insisting that they upgrade their NT equipment. The above anecdote is typical in my experience with the telcos, and underscores the need for a national broadband buildout in the USA, funded and run by the Federal Government, based upon the Australian National Broadband Network model. The USA telcos have had their chance, in my opinion, now is the time for them to get out of the way. Here is a link to the Australian National Broadband site, describing how the existing telco-owned copper network will be switched off: http://www.nbn.gov.au/2012/12/03/did-you-know-that-our-copper-network-is-being-switched-off/ David On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Constantine A. Murenin muren...@gmail.com wrote: On 28 January 2013 10:35, Warren Bailey wbai...@satelliteintelligencegroup.com wrote: Spoken like a true ATT customer..;) I've had an ATT FTTU in my bedroom closet, which was an Alcatel HONT-C (4 POTS (unused), 1 Ethernet; 155.52 Mbps upstream and 622.08 Mbps downstream; shared with at most 32 users), and ATT California outright refused to provision the U-verse internet at anything higher than 18Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream, at a time when their web-site loudly offered a 24Mbps tier for the general public for 10 extra bucks. Yes, this was at a time when VDSL2 users were already provisioned 24Mbps down and 3Mbps up; FTTU users weren't privileged as such (and probably still aren't to this day). ATT FTTU experience starts with the installation: you have a fibre technician that calls you prior to the date of the centrally-scheduled appointment, and tells you that you'll have an extra appointment prior (and in addition) to the original pre-scheduled appointment date. He'll also likely confide in you that that's the way things work at T -- he has to schedule his own appointments for FTTU ONT installation, and no single customer is beforehand informed of any such appointments. Then in a misunderstanding that something can be done to get the advertised speeds that certainly must be supported by the installed ONT, you can spend hours with sales, tech support and the ATT California executive office, who will all give all sorts of excuses that you are too long from the CO / VRAD / etc etc. Whereas in reality ATT is simply too lazy to update their FTTU provisioning profiles, and not a single FTTU installation is being offered any internet services above 18Mbps. (Somehow, it is my impression that noone in the company even knows this for a fact -- I've not had a single over-the-phone representative confirm that 24Mbps tier is never offered for FTTU.) Note that even if you disregard the fact that Verizon successfully delivers 25/25, 50/20 and many other tiers over essentially the same technology, the simple math of 622/155 divided by 32 users turns out to be higher than 18/1.5, and especially several factors higher than the 1.5 part of 18/1.5. This does not even account for many people getting the cheapest and slower tiers, or the fact that the whole point of FTTU BPON is overprovisioning support. Well, that's ATT for you: already has the network, already has the price structure, already has the marketing going, already has all the passive and active equipment installed that's capable of vastly superior speeds, already has the customers willing to pay more each month for faster speeds, and already has customers abandoning FTTU services because of artificially-imposed speed limitations, yet T still can't be bothered to flip some provisioning bits. C.
Problem with email to Hawaiilink.net email
Does anyone know of any problems in Hawaii with email or DNS problems? Sending from gmail.com and pacbell.net domains, I get: host mail.hawaiilink.net[24.43.223.114] said: 553 5.1.8 emailaddr...@pacbell.net ... Domain of sender address emailaddr...@pacbell.net does not exist (in reply to MAIL FROM command) Regards, David
Re: Programmers can't get IPv6 thus that is why they do not have IPv6 in their applications....
Many years ago the standard books on application network programming were based on C language. Books such as Adventures in UNIX Network Programming, and Professor Comer's Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol 3 detailed how to write C programs using BSD sockets where binding to a socket brought the program up in listening mode on an 2 tuple IP v4 IP address/TCP well known port. Once the program opened and bound to a socket netstat -n would show that program to be listening on the 2-tuple. Do today's programmers still use basic BSD socket programming? Is there an equivalent set of called procedures for IPv6 network application programming? On the practical side: Have all programmers created a 128 bit field to store the IPv6 address, where IPv4 programs use a 32 bit field to store the IP address? This would seem to be similar to the year 2000 case where almost all programs required auditing to see if they took into account dates after 1999. David On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:07 PM, Jeroen Massar jer...@unfix.org wrote: On 2012-11-27 20:21, mike wrote: On 11/26/12 9:32 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: The main problem with IPv6 only is that most app developers (most programmers totally) do not really have access to this, so no testing is being done. This is a point that is probably more significant than is appreciated. If the app, IT, and networking ecosystem don't even have access to ipv6 to play around with, you can be guaranteed that they are going to be hesitant about lighting v6 up in real life. I cannot be saf for the people who claim to be programmers who do things with networking and who do not care to follow the heavy hints that they have been getting for at least the last 10 years that their applications need to start supporting IPv6. Especially as APIs like getaddrinfo() make it really easy to do so. The following excellent article by our beloved true IPv6 Samuarai Itojun is from 1998: http://www.kame.net/newsletter/19980604/ Thus it is not like the information is not out there either. As for actually getting IPv6 at home or at work, there are so many ways to get that, thus not having it is a completely ridiculous excuse. (It might not be native, so wh00p, you can test fine also on a local link in the extreme case) Remember that silly thing called the 6bone and what the purpose of that was back then, indeed, for getting connectivity to the people so that they could fix their code and that ran from 1996 till 2006, 10 years where one could have fixed up those apps that was already 6 years ago again. As such, if an application does not do proper IPv6 today the people in charge of the thing simply did not care... Greets, Jeroen who proudly has been providing IPv6 connectivity and IPv6 patches for over more than a decade...
Fwd: MPLS acceptable latency?
-- Forwarded message -- From: david peahi davidpe...@gmail.com Date: Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 12:15 PM Subject: Re: MPLS acceptable latency? To: Mikeal Clark mikeal.cl...@gmail.com Assuming no configuration errors, this underscores the need to negotiate SLAs, and serious SLA penalties, with the telcos, and to always request a telco network map, with the telco path that data will be transitting end-to-end.. My rule of thumb in network design is that data over copper or fiber takes 10 ms per 1000 miles, which is governed by the speed of light. Network devices along the path add serialization/de-serialization delay, but with modern network devices this delay is negligible. So according to this rule of thumb 85 ms is almost enough time for data to traverse the USA 3 times. I have found that telcos have been setting round trip SLAs so high that they are meaningless (e.g. 50 ms for a GigE MEF ELAN service, 20 ms for Gold MEF EVPL service), and border on being fraudulent. In one case I also noted 100 ms round trip times between sites less than 1 mile away, and discovered that every packet was being sent back to east Texas from Southern California, almost a 5000 mile detour. On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Mikeal Clark mikeal.cl...@gmail.comwrote: Hello! I have some ATT MPLS sites under a managed contract with latency averaging 75-85 ms without any load. These sites are only 45 minutes away. What is considered normal/acceptable? Thanks,
Re: Dark fiber usage info request - know-how pointers and experience sharing
In the USA the Federal School Lunch program has built out a parallel fiber network equal to or superior to telco fiber in many urban locations, under the E-Rate program. TheE-Rate backbone fiber is leased typically on a 10-20 year IRU basis. Sunesys is a provider of dark fiber, and their web site interfaces with Google Maps to provide detailed fiber maps where they have deployed fiber (I do not work for Sunesys, or any other dark fiber company). My own experience with dark fiber using off the shelf long reach sfps (GiGE, CWDM wavelengths with passive mux technology, h, connecting Ethernet switches from various vendors) is that dark fiber networks are extremely stable,and require little maintenance once operational. An experienced network engineer will have no trouble deploying such a network. David On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 10:31 AM, Stefan netfort...@gmail.com wrote: Looking at dark fiber leasing as an alternative for existing ISP-acquired MPLS, MetroE, P2P, etc. services. I would appreciate some pointers (links) into specific technologies used with dark fiber, as direct consumer (not ISP). I am not looking for the theory behind (C)DWDM, but rather real life implementations and experience with folks operating such. Highly appreciated would also be extra info on what the learning curve required for traditional network engineering crew to operate devices terminating into such, and maybe even work (installation and operation) needed to maintain plants with this infrastructure. TIA, ***Stefan
Cisco 6509 SUP32 SNMP Meltdown With CatOS
Anyone have experience with Cisco 6509E/SUP32 crashing under heavy SNMP polling load, causing high cpu utilization and 6509 lockup, requiring 6509 reboot? CatOS is deployed. Is the behavior any different with 6509 IOS? David
Re: Ethernet OAM BCPs Please are there any yet???
I have used BRIX active measurement for IP for many years, but here is a link that describes BRIX in conjunction with ADVA for Ethernet probes. There is an article in IEEE Communications Magazine circa 2004-2005 by ATT researchers describing their roll your own active measurement system, theoretical assumptions, and theory of probe data collection. David On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 2:28 AM, Adam Vitkovsky adam.vitkov...@swan.skwrote: Hi Are there any best common practices for the CFM levels use Since my pure Ethernet aggregation layers are small I believe I only need two CFM levels I plan on using Level 5 between CPEs managed by us and Level 4 between Aggregation devices -that's where MPLS PWs kicks in So leaving Level 7 and Level 6 for customers and carrier-customers respectfully -would this be enough please? I'm also interested on what's the rule of thumb for CCMs Frequency, Number of Packets, Interpacket Interval, Packet Size and Lifetime for the particular operation Thanks a lot for any inputs adam
Re: The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire /8
Those who argue that IPv4 addresses must be reclaimed seem to have forgotten that even for small organizations, converting IPv4 address space to RFC1918 addresses, or IPv6, is a huge task given the fixed IP addresses of many devices (printers, copy machines, etc.), and even worse, the many key business application programs that use hard-coded IP addresses instead of DNS resolution. Many of these application programs were written many years ago, and are poorly supported, such that making code changes places a company's business success on the line. Of course, unused /8 prefixes appear to be an abuse, but as some have noted in this thread, many large organizations were assigned /8s decades ago, and have used them for IP addressing for key business functions. David On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: http://paritynews.com/network/item/325-department-of-work-and-pensions-uk-in-possession-of-169-million-unused-ipv4-addresses Department of Work and Pensions UK in Possession of 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses Written by Ravi Mandalia Department of Work and Pensions UK in Possession of 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire block of '/8' IPv4 addresses that is unused and an e-petition has been filed in this regards asking the DWP to sell it off thus easing off the RIPE IPv4 address space scarcity a little. John Graham-Cumming, who found this unused block, wrote in a blog post that the DWP was in possession of 51.0.0.0/8 IPv4 addresses. According to Cumming, these 16.9 million IP addresses are unused at the moment and he derived this conclusion by doing a check in the ASN database. “A check of the ASN database will show that there are no networks for that block of addresses,” he wrote. An e-petition has been filed in this regards. “It has recently come to light that the Department for Work and Pensions has its own allocated block of 16,777,216 addresses (commonly referred to as a /8), covering 51.0.0.0 to 51.255.255.255”, reads the petition. The UK government, if it sells off this /8 block, could end up getting £1 billion mark. “£1 billion of low-effort extra cash would be a very nice thing to throw at our deficit,” read the petition. Cumming ends his post with the remark, “So, Mr. Cameron, I'll accept a 10% finder's fee if you dispose of this asset :-)”.
Re: Are people still building SONET networks from scratch?
In my neck of the woods, critical locations often exist in the middle of nowhere, resulting in underserved facilities, where best effort networks such as metro Ethernet cannot be trusted to remain available 24x7x365. Many times, during prime business hours, I will see a telco metro Ethernet spanning tree convergence which results in my traffic re-routing for 20-30 seconds over my private backup network path, then switching back to the metro Ethernet path after the telco technicians have finished their maintenance. Several times when I have called in a trouble ticket, the telco tech has asked what is the big deal, it was only a 20 second outage?. In the Enterprise environment, a planned spanning tree convergence in the middle of business hours is one of the quickest ways for a network engineer to be relieved of their duties, but apparently the bar is considerably lower in the telco environment. Not only that, but the telco SLAs associated with metro Ethernet are totally bogus, with a best round trip SLA of 20 milliseconds, ranging up to 50 milliseconds for bronze service. For short distances of 100 miles or less (rule of thumb is that light travels over fiber at 0.80 x speed of light, or 1000 miles in 10 milliseconds), an SLA of 20-50 milliseconds amounts to fraud, just another way for the telcos to scam the consumer. The tone of many of the entries on this thread where the user is depicted as being unreasonable, underscores the need for a coordinated national broadband policy in the USA, based upon the Australian model in which the government is building out fiber to every residence and business, no matter where they are located. Regards, David On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Will Orton w...@loopfree.net wrote: We've run into an issue with a customer that has been confounding us for a few months as we try to design what they need. The customer has a location in the relative middle of nowhere that they are trying to build a protected OC3 to. Ultimately, their traffic on it will be packet data (IP/ethernet, not channelized/voice). But they seem to be absolutely 100% set on the idea that they build with Cisco ONS boxes and that they run and control the D1-D12 bytes in order to manage protection switching on the OC3 (and have their DCC channel for management). Since this is the middle of nowhere, we are having to piece it together from a few runs of dark fiber here and there and lit services from about 3 other providers to get from the desired point A to the desired point B. The issues we seem to be hitting are: -We seem to be unable to find anyone who sells lit OC3 with D1-D12 transparency for the client. Sometimes we can get D1-D3, but that's it. -lit OC3/12/48 is ridiculously expensive comapred to 1g ethernet waves or 10g waves (choice LAN/WAN ethernet or OC192) 10g waves are cheap enough that we have entertained the idea of buying them and putting OC-192/muxponders on the ends to provide the OC-3, but even then I'm having trouble finding boxes that will do D1-D12 transparency for client OC-3. Building the whole thing on dark fiber so that we could specify the exact equipment on every hop isn't going to happen, as the protect path is about 1000 miles and the geography is such that we don't really have a market for all the other wasted capacity there would be on that path. Having much more experience with ethernet/packet/MPLS setups, we are trying to get the client to admit that 1g/10g waves running ethernet with QoS would be as good as or better in terms of latency, jitter, and loss for their packet data. So far they will barely listen to the arguments. And then going the next leap and showing them that we could work towards 50ms protection switching with MPLS/BFD/etc packet-based protocols is another stretch. Am I missing something here that my customer isn't, or is it the other way around? -Will
Re: Cisco 7200 PCI Limitations
The 7200 architecture dates from the late 1990s, and is basically modeled on a PCI-bus UNIX workstation from that era. The 7200 is usable today as a WAN aggregation router for T1 access, and nothing else. Using it as a GiGE transit router will place a non-deterministic node in the network, unable to scale to the 4 GiGE full-duplex throughput. Even worse is creating a portchannel out of the 7200 GiGE interfaces and using dot1q sub-interfaces to emulate an Ethernet switch in 7200 software, then connecting the 7200 dot1q trunk to a modern Ethernet switch with a wire speed backplane (for example a Cisco 3560X Ethernet switch). Long since considered an unacceptable best practice (due to the 7200 backplane limitation vs adjacent, directly connected modern Ethernet switches), Cisco is still teaching portchannel in its router configuration classes, so relatively new network engineers have actually been known to use this ill-considered configuration. If a 4 port GiGE Cisco router is needed, then the ASR1001 is the modern version of the 7206, with wire speed throughput. On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 12:36 AM, shthead li...@shthead.com wrote: Hi all, I have a 7200 series router (7204) here and I am trying to figure out something with it. Currently the router has a NPE-G1 card in it, giving it 3 gig interfaces but I need an extra gig interface on it to make 4. Having a look around the available options are either get a PA-GE card that fits into one of the slots on the router or to get a C7200-I/O-GE+E (I/O controller with a gbit port on it). The PA-GE wouldn't be suitable as looking at the Cisco site the PCI bus will limit it to 300mbit full duplex (and it goes on further to say it will be limited to approx 200mbit in best case scenario due to the design of the card) [1]. The other option left is the I/O controller. I found that you can get a port adaptor jacket card [2] for the 7200's that let you stick a normal interface card into the I/O controller slot (instead of the I/O controller itself). My main concern is if the jacket card uses its own PCI bus I am assuming the C7200-I/O-GE+E also connects via PCI which means it would be subject to the same limitations as the PA-GE. Does anyone have any idea if that would be correct and the only option for another gbit port would be to get another device? Thanks for the help [1] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/**products/hw/routers/ps341/** products_tech_**note09186a00800c814a.shtml#**backinfohttp://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps341/products_tech_note09186a00800c814a.shtml#backinfo [2] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/**prod/collateral/routers/ps341/** prod_qas0900aecd8045055e.htmlhttp://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps341/prod_qas0900aecd8045055e.html
Re: Cisco Smartnet for 6509E Line Cards
This is also the way I have understood chassis Smartnet in the past, that is that line cards have always been covered, and in my career, Cisco has always replaced (RMA'd) failed line cards of any kind no questions asked. This seems to be a new Cisco policy, quoting Smartnet for line cards. Does anyone know if companies like Arista, which advocate merchant silicon for their Ethernet switches, have a one price support contract for the whole ball of wax if a component fails in their switches? Regards, David On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 5:26 AM, STARNES, CURTIS curtis.star...@granburyisd.org wrote: That is the way I understood it in the past but: I recently priced a new 10G blade for our 6509 and was quoted Smartnet for it. I asked about if it was covered under the chassis Smartnet and was told that line cards were not covered. I do know that I have replaced the supervisor card before under the Smartnet contract on the chassis. My understanding now is that the chassis, supervisor card, fan trays, and power supplies are covered by the chassis Smarnet. Any line cards added need to be covered with their own Smartnet contract. If anyone knows better, please let us (me in particular) know. I work in the K-12 educational market and right now the Smarnet on the chassis runs about 30% of what the chassis costs (bare chassis without sup, fans, and power supplies). If the sup, fan trays and powers supplies are not covered then that is a steep price to pay for a bare chassis. I could buy another chassis and put on the shelf and it would be cheaper since the chassis itself would have to be abused badly to need replacing. If the chassis, supervisor, fans, and power supplies are covered under the chassis contract then the pricing on the chassis contract makes sense. Curtis -Original Message- From: david peahi [mailto:davidpe...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 12:02 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Cisco Smartnet for 6509E Line Cards Can anyone comment on Cisco 6509E Smartnet chassis coverage? In the past, chassis has always meant, not just the passive chassis itself, but all of the components including supervisor cards, line cards, power supplies, fan trays, etc. Now it appears that Cisco is requiring Smartnet coverage on line cards in addition to the chassis. My understanding is that Smartnet functioned much like insurance policies, where Cisco collected maintenance contract fees year after year, but the devices were generally so reliable that the collected Smartnet fees always far exceeded the dollar amount required to replace failed components. Regards, David
Cisco Smartnet for 6509E Line Cards
Can anyone comment on Cisco 6509E Smartnet chassis coverage? In the past, chassis has always meant, not just the passive chassis itself, but all of the components including supervisor cards, line cards, power supplies, fan trays, etc. Now it appears that Cisco is requiring Smartnet coverage on line cards in addition to the chassis. My understanding is that Smartnet functioned much like insurance policies, where Cisco collected maintenance contract fees year after year, but the devices were generally so reliable that the collected Smartnet fees always far exceeded the dollar amount required to replace failed components. Regards, David
Re: best practives multi-homed BGP 2 physical locations
I'm fortunate to have a /16, and advertise 2 /18s from the primary, and 4 /17s from the backup collo, /16 from both with AS Prepend on backup /16, and depend on BGP longest prefix route selection to create symmetric Internet routing back to my locations. I run IBGP between geographically diverse locations internally, over an L2 VLAN extended over a GiGE dot1q trunk. Internet-facing load-balancers select the best server from distributed server farms spread across the 2 sites. I think this is a fairly standard configuration. On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Philip Lavine source_ro...@yahoo.comwrote: Easy part: I need to provide my users acces to the internet from my HQ site via a local Internet connection or via a colo. Hard part: I also need to provide incoming access to hosted apps (HTTP, FTP, SMTP) from either location, so if the colo internet connection goes down the traffic can re-route to the HQ server farm and visa versa. I am in the process of purchasing an AS and ip space. Is it advisable to use the same IP space at both locations and run iBGP over a dedicated L2 connection between the sites. P From: Mick O'Rourke mkorou...@gmail.com To: Philip Lavine source_ro...@yahoo.com Cc: nanog@nanog.org nanog@nanog.org Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2012 2:48 PM Subject: Re: best practives multi-homed BGP 2 physical locations As in - use of multi or single AS? - private, vpn or other dci? - etc What's the purpose of the site? Or what end result are you trying to achieve? On Jun 15, 2012 6:04 AM, Philip Lavine source_ro...@yahoo.com wrote: Is there any best practices documentation on how to run BGP multihoming accross two phyiscally seperated sites.
Re: Verizon 1xRTT/EVDO for OOB
We use 1X/EVDO for telemetry polling, but find that the latency is very high with VZW to Verizon wired networks located in east Texas, so if your network is on the west coast, every packet traverses the US continent twice even though the endpoints may be less than 100 miles (or even 1 mile) apart. VZW also tears down the cell tower to cell modem connection every 24 hours, resulting in IP connectivity loss, so this service is no good for high availability applications. ATT Mobility has a similar service, but they keep the connection up all the time allowing the network designer to use their service for high availability applications. ATT's gateways are in the Pacific Northwest, I believe, so the latency problem is the same. On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 7:53 AM, Christopher J. Pilkington c...@0x1.netwrote: Is anyone using Verizon 1xRTT/EVDO (3G) for OOB work? I'm trying to sort out how exactly to order a compatible service from them. Unfortunately I don't manage our Verizon Wireless relationship, so I need to be specific. Is there a service code or name they refer to this service as? Looking for low bandwidth, static IP. -cjp
Re: Partial Outage with TW Telecom and CenturyLink
Yesterday at about 3 pm PDT DNS resolution problems were experienced through Centurylink. Apparently their Phoenix DNS servers were unreachable for some time. These types of incidents never happened with Qwest. Anyone else report a service degradation since Centurylink took over? On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Eric C. Miller e...@ericheather.comwrote: Morning Everyone, Yesterday between about 1900 and 2230 UTC, we had a partial drop with reaching various sites through TW Telecom from our circuit in Orlando, FL. The unavailable sites included Facebook, Newegg, and Godaddy. The outage did not affect our Atlanta TW Telecom. I confered with a colleague who manages a large customer in Apopka who said that they appeared not to be affected. His circuit and ours loop to the same TW Telecom POP. But even more Murphy than that, our Centurylink secondary circuit was having a routing loop issue at the same time, so while our BGP routes were being advertised to world through Centurylink, the circuit was useless. Centurylink aknowledged the existence of a bigger transport issue and said that we weren't the only customer affected. Anybody else notice these issues or have any other insight? Thanks! Eric Miller
Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc (was: att fiber, et al)
I have discovered that the Federal School Lunch E-Rate program has built out an entirely parallel fiber optic infrastructure in the USA, bypassing telco fiber in many urban areas such as Los Angeles/Southern California. There are now companies that exist solely to construct E-Rate fiber. Sunesys is one such company. E-Rate builds out fiber to schools and libraries, and the telcos apparently have lobbied to ensure that a lateral to a library, for example, does not become a local fiber hub, but the backbone fiber can be used by anyone, with laterals built to order. I do not work for any of these E-Rate companies, but have discovered their potential use for connecting my network locations together. On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Jared Mauch ja...@puck.nether.net wrote: On Mar 22, 2012, at 11:05 AM, chris wrote: I'm all for VZ being able to reclaim it as long as they open their fiber which I don't see happening unless its by force via government. At the end of the day there needs to be the ability to allow competitors in so of course they shouldnt be allowed to rip out the regulated part and replace it with a unregulated one. I think this partly captures the incentive case here, but there is also a larger one at play. Over the years the copper infrastructure was installed and extended through various incentive programs. You can see the modern-day reflection of that in the RUS (used to manage rural electrification act, part of USDA) and NTIA (Department of Commerce). The barriers to entry are significant for a new player in the marketplace. The cost is putting the cabling in the ground vs the cost of the cable itself. One can easily pick up hardware for $250 to light a single strand of 9/125 SM fiber @ 10km for a 1Gb/s ethernet link. That's low enough you could likely get a consumer to buy the hardware. The real cost is the installation per strand foot/mile. In the past this has been subsidized for copper plant. There is no reason in my mind that the fiber plant should be treated differently from this standpoint. I can find fiber optic cabling for $0.25/ft. The problem here is a multi-dimensional one that I've seen play out in a few markets: Verizon selling assets to Fairpoint (NH, ME, VT). These are high cost areas due to low-density population. For the sale to go through, Fairpoint had to agree to build into these higher cost areas. The result was bankruptcy for Fairpoint. Verizon sold assets in Michigan (and other states) to Frontier. I've not tracked this one as closely, but I suspect the economics of this are fairly complex. I've also spoken to some small ISPs and their general cost of building fiber to the home tends to be $2500/subscriber in upfront capital. This covers just the installation cost. Due to years of subsidy and regulation, people are unwilling to pay this amount to install a telecommunications service whereas a new home requiring a connection to the water, sewers, natural gas or electric grid may pay $10k or more to connect. Many people wouldn't think of buying a home without electric service, but without modern telecommunication service? I've seen this play out after the fact with friends asking how to get service. Satellite, Fixed wireless or just cellular data quickly become their fallbacks. The demand is there, the challenge becomes recovering the build cost. It is my firm belief that without a regulatory regime it will not be feasible to connect many communities robustly to modern communications infrastructure. This could clearly change if the carriers involved see fit to replace this infrastructure, but with their current debt loads, I think it will be challenging to say the least. Taking a look at Verizon - Their most recent quarterly balance sheet shows: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=VZ Assets: 230.461 Billion USD Liabilities: 194.491 Billion USD. This is not a lot of money, considering they have growing liabilities on a quarterly basis as part of their debt load (Long-term debt of $50 Billion). A large fiber build would easily cost a few billion dollars and have lots of regulatory barriers. In my county it costs $200 to go over or under any public road (just for the permit). This starts to add up quickly. I do think we need a new last-mile regime in many areas, be it more fair access similar to pole attach fees or the removal of local barriers to build this infrastructure. Some school and other governments here in Michigan would love to sell/lease their excess fiber capacity to the private sector, but are worried about turning a profit when it was built with taxpayer funds and problems associated with that. I'd like to see these barriers removed. If it's there, lets make it of value. If the school system turns a profit on their enterprise, that's fine, it can lower the tax burden elsewhere. Me? I'd be willing to pay $2500 to have Fiber built to my home. I might
Re: Verizon FiOS - is BGP an option?
What is the SLA for FIOS? I believe that FIOS uses either PON or GPON technology where a single data wavelength is split up to 32 times resulting in a shared pipe back to the CO. Does Verizon offer any SLA at all for FIOS? On the other hand Verizon Wireless offers BGP peering for business customers, but lacks geographically-dispersed peering points with their wired network, which results in unusually high round trip latencies. On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Justin M. Streiner strei...@cluebyfour.org wrote: All: I realize this might be a bit of a fool's errand, but I'm trying to determine if Verizon will speak BGP with FiOS business customers. Their website is relatively lean on details. Everything that mentions BGP points to VZB services, which does not appear to include FiOS. Looking at the routing table, I do see several non-VZ ASNs downstream of AS19262, so it looks like it might be possible. If that is the case, could anyone lend any insight to get past the what is BGP? response that likely awaits from their salescritters? jms
Re: MEF-CECP training
I also would be interested in any information. It looks like MEF recognizes 4 training companies: http://metroethernetforum.org/page_loader.php?p_id=1577 One company offers just 1 class then an exam for certification. On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Andy Susag asu...@ifncom.net wrote: Hi All, It seems like here in the Americas we have a choice of either Tech 2000 or Perpetual Solutions for MEF certification training. Perpetual Solutions is about $1000 more per seat, but seems a little more robust. Has anyone gone through this training or used either of these companies? Thanks, Andy Susag Network Engineer IFN
Fwd: VLAN Troubles
-- Forwarded message -- From: david peahi davidpe...@gmail.com Date: Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 9:47 AM Subject: Re: VLAN Troubles To: Alan Bryant a...@alanbryant.com Why don't you replace the Dell switches with Cisco 3560s, and that way you are working with a single implementation of the IEEE 802.1q trunking standard? I think the very existence of this email thread proves that much time and effort is wasted in the attempt to seamlessly interoperate devices from multiple vendors. In this email thread alone I counted 2 CLI's to be learned, 2 tech support organizations to call, and 2 hardware types to spare. David On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 8:07 AM, Alan Bryant a...@alanbryant.com wrote: I hope everyone is having a better workday so far than I am. I am trying to clean up the network for the Hospital I work for, and part of that is creating two VLAN's for two separate subnets on our network. Before, it was not separated by VLANs. We are also replacing our aged Juniper firewall with an ASA. I'm very new to VLAN's, so I am hoping this is something simple that you guys can help me out with. We have two switches that do not seem to be passing VLAN traffic. The two switches are a Dell Powerconnect 5324 a Cisco 3560G. The Cisco switch appears to be functioning fine, but the Dell switch is only passing traffic to the Cisco that is on the default untagged VLAN1. Our second VLAN is not getting passed to the Cisco at all, I am not seeing any packets tagged with the particular vlan in Wireshark. I have Port 1 on the Dell switch connected to port 29 on the Cisco switch, and port 1 on the Cisco switch connected to the ASA. I have the following config on the relevant ports on the Cisco switch: interface GigabitEthernet0/1 description ASA 5505 switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk interface GigabitEthernet0/29 description Radiology Switch switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk Here is the config for the Dell switch: interface ethernet g1 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g2 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g3 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g4 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g5 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g7 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g9 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g10 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g12 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g14 speed 1000 duplex full exit interface ethernet g15 speed 1000 duplex full exit port jumbo-frame interface ethernet g1 switchport mode trunk exit interface ethernet g24 switchport mode trunk exit vlan database vlan 12,22 exit interface range ethernet g(2,4,7,12,14-15) switchport access vlan 12 exit interface vlan 12 name Radiology exit interface vlan 22 name Guest exit interface vlan 1 exit Anyone have any ideas or pointers? Is there more information that I need to provide? Vlan1 works just fine, of course. It is Vlan 12 that is not working. Everything on the Dell switch is communicating with each other just fine on the same subnet.
