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Tracing the Syrian Blackout

World IPv6 Day

Syrian Internet Shutdown

Qwavvis: The Battle for Second

Level Crossing

by Fredy Künzler

This blog has nearly been abandoned - sorry about that. Time is running, and spare time is very limited...

Anyway, yesterday I came across a nasty issue which seems not to be documented anywhere in the web, and therefore I thought to make a note here for further reference, maybe it's helpful for someone.

We (Init7, AS13030) were about to bring up a new 10gig interconnect with a peer. They happen to run Juniper gear, while we operate Broacade / Foundry XMR routers. The cable was plugged, the light was on, rx and tx values good. The Juniper showed the port up, IP address was pingable, but the port on the Brocade router remained down. We already thought about a broken interface, before I started to play with the phy-mode parameter.

The Juniper can do only WAN-phy and LAN-phy (I don't have Juniper experience though), but the Brocade has three modes. It offers LAN-phy by default (to revert back to LAN-phy, use the 'no' parameter), WAN-phy and a mode called "28k":

(config-if-e10000-4/3)#phy-mode ?
28k Bay 28000
wan 10G WAN PHY mode

It was worth a try, and after setting phy-mode to 28k, the interface on the Brocade came up immediately. I don't know whether there is any drawback, traffic is now flowing normal... (WAN-phy mode has less capacity than LAN-phy, though).

My config looks now like this (anonymised and abridged):

#sh run int eth 4/3
interface ethernet 4/3
port-name Foo-Bar
enable
route-only
ip address x.x.x.x/30
phy-mode 28k
!

on blogg.ch (German, based on an English document): Threats to the Internet Routing and Global Connectivity

on blogg.ch (German): Schweden überwacht russischen IP Verkehr

by Fredy Künzler

We recently received an email saying

Please remove 174.0.0.0/8 from your bogon filter...

and indeed, as time flies by, we had an outdated BOGON filter list implemented. IANA keeps allocating /8 to RIRs and if network administrators don't pay attention, parts of the internet could silently become unreachable.

In the past few month these blocks should have become routable:

112.0.0.0/8
113.0.0.0/8
114.0.0.0/8
115.0.0.0/8
173.0.0.0/8
174.0.0.0/8
186.0.0.0/8
187.0.0.0/8

Therefore it's probably wise to check if you see any more specifics of these prefixes (on Cisco / Foundry / Quagga type "sh ip bgp 113.0.0.0/8 longer").

I know that BOGON filtering could be automated, but we never found the time to get it done properly, and, as the available IPv4 space is running out, the Bogon Route Server Project will become obsolete anytime soon.

by Fredy Künzler

Even the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) preaches now IPv6! ... and I guess when official institutions start to worry, it's serious. Functionaries usually don't tend to be fast movers.

I recently asked a fellow service provider about his IPv6 plans, and the answer was a bit ignorant: "noone is paying me to implement IPv6, therefore I don't have a project". Looking back to the early days of the Internet, a lot of research and test-implementations have been done withouth payment, and it became the foundation of a whole industry. Money should not be the focus when evaluating IPv6, at least for another year or so.

I gave a presentation at the recent SwiNOG #16 meeting about implementing IPv6 in a providers backbone. In fact, IPv6 is much easier than people generally think. If you are a network professional, everything you know about BGP, subnetting, OSPF etc. is still valid, at least more or less.

If you plan to deploy IPv6 anytime soon, click through the slides, they might be helpful (or download the IPv6 Now! presentation):