Recently in Internet Category

Two months ago, I had a fibre internet connection installed by Openreach, which should be much more reliable than the existing copper line, but it didn't work properly. Within 2 minutes of first being connected it had lost communication entirely and then experienced intermittent packet loss throughout every day making it unusable. After 6 engineer appointments (and they didn't even show up for the last one) they continued to blame my router as being of the "incorrect type" and "overcomplicated".

They're supposed to have a service level guarantee of 48 hours but it took 47 days for them to fix this fault, which was caused by fibre cables being swapped somewhere in the Openreach network. Most of that time was spent convincing them that there is in fact a fault somewhere in the BT Wholesale or Openreach network that needs to be fixed. It would be nice if the monopoly provider of connectivity in the UK had better processes.

At last... an internet connection running at almost the maximum line speed.

Max:   Upstream rate = 26390 Kbps, Downstream rate = 82608 Kbps
Path:  0, Upstream rate = 20000 Kbps, Downstream rate = 79999 Kbps

Over 300 people from the UK Internet community got together to mark the end of IPv4 at the London Transport Museum and promote the adoption of IPv6.

Ed Vaizey MP did an introductory speech followed by an review of IPv4 by Prof Peter Kirstein (UCL) and IPv6 by Simon McCalla (Nominet). After a short panel debate on IPv6 readiness there was a mock handover of 185/8 from IANA to RIPE NCC. Finally, Gary Feldman performed his RIPE55 song "The day the routers died" (a parody of American Pie).

I took a few photos and some video. The Internet survived unharmed (although I did turn it off at one point, sorry if you were using it at the time).

Based on an idea from a NANOG post I created a script to walk an ip6.arpa zone and list all IPv6 hosts.

It works surprisingly well:

$ ./ip6dnswalk.py 2620:0:1C00::/40
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0003 www.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0004 login.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0005 hphotos-sjc1.v6.fbcdn.net.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0006 apps.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0007 m.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0008 register.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0009 check6.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0000 pr01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0001 pr02.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0002 bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0003 bb02.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0004 pr02.pao1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0005 pr03.pao1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0006 bb01.pao1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0007 bb02.pao1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0008 ae0.pr01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0009 ae0.bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:000c ae4.bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:000d ae2.bb01.pao1.tfbnw.net.

More details and a method of preventing this are in my ip6walk git repository.

Finally. It took an extra 17 days to work around BT's inadequate ordering system, and then another extra 10 days for BT to send out an engineer before they could discover that they needed to override their Dynamic Line (mis-)Management system in order to allow the upstream line rate to be 10000Kbps... for a few more hours. Followed by another 3 days for it to slowly automatically increase the speed because they're incompetent and unable to override the system. Additional delay provided by AAISP caching the line check result too aggressively.

Since wednesday (the 22nd) I've been able to use my ADSL connection, so I now have IPv4, (native) IPv6 and multicast IPv4 at the fastest possible speeds. :)

[Nov 21 16:47:27] down
[Nov 21 16:47:29] attempting to activate
[Nov 21 16:47:31] down
[Nov 21 16:47:33] attempting to activate
[Nov 21 16:47:37] training
[Nov 21 16:47:38] channel analysis
[Nov 21 16:47:39] attempting to activate
[Nov 21 16:47:42] training
[Nov 21 16:47:44] channel analysis
[Nov 21 16:47:48] up (8128 kb/s down | 832 kb/s up)
[Nov 21 16:59:57] attempting to activate
[Nov 21 17:00:06] training
[Nov 21 17:00:08] channel analysis
[Nov 21 17:00:10] attempting to activate
[Nov 21 17:00:14] training
[Nov 21 17:00:16] channel analysis
[Nov 21 17:00:20] exchange
[Nov 21 17:00:21] up (8128 kb/s down | 832 kb/s up)

Now if only I had a username and password to connect with, and account details of where to send money...

After moving into a flat in Dalgety Bay on Saturday, I'm now waiting for a proper internet connection. The speed of dialup is really annoying me. It takes BT 14 hours to reconnect a phone line but 3 days to notice it exists and a further 7 days to activate ADSL on it...