Networking

The ISP That Operates Like a Tech Person Designed It

by

When I was building out my OPNsense router, I had a decision to make. Keep running Pi-hole for DNS and DHCP, or switch over to the built-in AdGuard on the router itself.

I’d been using Pi-hole for a while and the functionality was genuinely compelling. But if I was critical of my own uses, I wasn’t really using most of it. The main thing I got out of the Pi-Hole was ad blocking at the DNS level, and I can get that from a privacy-focused DNS provider like Mullvad anyway. So I made the call to consolidate everything onto the router.

Turns out that decision had a nice side effect.

My ISP is Andrews & Arnold, and they give me an IPv6 block along with a dedicated IPv4 address for my router. There were some limitations with Pi-hole when it came to properly handing out public IPv6 addresses to devices on the network. Could be a Pi-hole thing. Could be me never having quite sorted it. I am not really sure. Either way, moving everything to the router cleared it up. Now every device on my network gets its own real, internet-facing IPv6 address.

Do I need this? Absolutely not. But the network engineer version of me from the early 2000s would have been beside himself.

Which brings me to Andrews & Arnold, because I don’t think I’ve written about them directly before and they are pretty awesome. Also it feels like they are a bit unique in terms of internet providers.

I first used them when we moved to the UK and I needed a DSL connection. They were great, but the Openreach copper line quality at the time was a problem and the speeds weren’t there, so I ended up switching to Virgin for a few years just to get something faster. Then Openreach rolled out FTTP to our neighbourhood and I went straight back to A&A.

They are not outrageous, but they are noticeably more expensive than the value options out there. When I first signed up for FTTP I had to pick a usage tier, which I have a moral objection to on principle, and I ended up needing to go above the one terabyte plan pretty quickly. To their credit they’ve since moved their higher tier to unlimited, so that’s sorted itself out eventually.

But here’s why I pay it. Their documentation literally has sections like “want to run your own DNS server? Go ahead, we don’t mind.” When you place an order you have to acknowledge that you’re getting completely unfiltered internet access. Your static IP address comes on a little plastic card in the box like a hotel key, which I know is just a piece of plastic, but the confidence of that gesture still lands.

I was at a talk a while back where someone was explaining the steps they’d gone through to get their own IPv6 block registered in their own name rather than their ISP’s. They they went on to discuss their ISP assigning it for their use at their house. The process sounded painful and involved. I could tell from the context it was a UK audience, and I quietly suspected I knew which ISP they were using. Afterwards I asked the guy. Yep, Andrews & Arnold.

I priced out EE recently for comparable or even higher bandwidth plans. Substantially cheaper. But online the answers about what restrictions they actually impose are, charitably, murky. With Andrews & Arnold I know exactly what I’m getting. And what I’m getting is an ISP that operates like a tech person designed it. From what I have read that is because it was founded by tech people.

Still well worth the money.

Everyone Gets an IP Address

by

I just got a new internet provider (might blog in more detail about them another time. One of the reasons I like them is they are not restrictive. I get a static IP address on my router. Nothing is filtered. I even get a /64 IPv6 range. Now I am trying to figure out how to use that many addresses. To non tech folks it’s never. That is how much it is.

Network Issues

by

Today started early with a network circuit outage, and closed the day with another network circuit outage. All told i think we had three distinct circuits go on the fritz. We had backups, but one needed to be manually switched and the outages caused us to stop everything and work on the problems. It was a long tiring day. I passed up going out for my dad’s birthday because i was so tired and i had a minor head ache.

Cisco Networkers 2006

by

It is weird, for months you are preparing yourself (mentally if not physically) for some event. And then it is over and it is like OK what now? I am back from Las Vegas. I had a great time, and I learned allot at Networkers. And now it is like what’s next? I know that answer but it is just a bit different with this big event over with.

In the short term I have to focus on my office move, and a few other issues. The next few weeks will probably be a bit hectic while we transition into the new place.

As for what I took away from Networkers, I learned allot. I got insight on what’s next for IPCC (UCC I guess now). Upgrade options for Call Manager, and a ton of great disaster recovery and disaster resiliency ideas. I have to start laying the ground work for going to California for Networkers 2007!

Busy Week

by

I had a busy week at work. We meet some major milestones this week, but it was a long week. We finally had our voice and data circuits installed in the new office. The LEC solved all the riser cable issues last week. They then completed the install’s of the smart jacks Monday. Tuesday we got internet up, and then the big event was getting our voice circuits up and running on Thursday. It was close for a while but we resoled our issues at the last minute. We had test calls done so now the next phase of the move can begin.

Construction is far allong. The electrical is in progress in the telecom room. We look like we are on target for our move date. That makes me happy, or rather more relaxed about the situation. When we get back from Networkers we need to get a person or two to focus on the move almost exclusively.

Other work going on is our domain upgrade should be near or on target to complete by the end of the month. I was worried for a while. We also have a project begining to deploy Identify’s Appsite. that program looks great. I can’t wait till we have that rolled out for use.

Projects

by

We officially are lease holders in our new office building. Everything was signed and executed Friday. That was interesting because technically we took occupancy of the floor on Thursday. Dan, and I walked over today to get the first keys for us.

I am still dealing with issues with the LEC regarding our phone circuits. We missed every date they gave us, but hopefully we will be ok if they make up time on the second phase of everything.

Our migration of users in our call center is progressing, but not as fast as I would have hoped. The staff up there claim that they have ironed out the issues with the new computer builds and will complete the first major milestone by Wednesday. I am not sure if I believe that assessment but I hope they do finish by then. If they do we will be in halfway decent shape to complete the project by June 30.

I worked all day with Jayson and Scott on Sunday to get ZEN up and running. We made progress but not as much as I originally thought we would. That setup is still ongoing but we still have allot of work to do on it. More updates soon.

Remote Desktop Access

by

For a while now we have wanted to solve a problem regarding remote users. We have a few remote users who we want to be able to log into our DMZ and access some web sites and services on our network. The solution we came up with is to use Windows 2003 Terminal Services. We only need to accomidate maybe 5 people at a time on this system. it is not very many users, but it was an important issue to resolve. Now that we have that system up and running I think we came up with a better longer term solution.

I am eyeing using the free VMware Server to host a few Windows XP virtual machines for the same purpose. We don’t need 5 concurrent users, so I won’t need that many VM’s. I also don’t need to deal with Microsoft’s licensing model for Terminal Server (per desktop or per user). VMware is touting their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. It may be something that fits for us. This initial project is just the first part of our needs for a solution such as this. I have 2 other projects that could require this sort of remote access. I am waiting for time to demo the solution to see how viable it will be for us.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Cable Work

by

Jayson and I went to the “proposed” new office with a cable contractor to see if there was cable to our floor from the basement. We need a clean run for our T-1 circuits going in. There looks like there is cable but we have issues with its age, and we cannot 100% confirm where it terminates on one end. on the other end it just doesn’t go where we wanted it to. Instead of extending what we have we may just run brand new cable to ensure it works right.

We did that in the morning and then I dealt with other issues throughout the day.

Performance Issues Resolved

by

After like 4 passes at the configuration of our network (switches, firewall’s, load balancers, etc) Danny found an abonormality that we wanted to correct and see what happened. On our core switch side we had the port where our Pix went set to full duplex 100meg, but on our Pix (configured years earlier than our core) it was set to auto. Turns out the Pix does not auto sense the 100meg full, but does not error out in the situation. You don’t even get lost packets, but you do get some collisions. Well some is an understatement.

Later in the day we set the port on the pix to be full duplex 100meg and within a few hours our metrics back to normal. This little change took us weeks to find. This is not the first time I have been burned by a port mismatch. Knowing that we even took steps to prevent this, or we thought we did.

It is frustrating to find such a little issue that does not show with errors causes so much problems..

Site Issues & Network Disasters

by

I took yesterday off to catch up on some sleep. I ended up by the office in the late afternoon to go with Jayson backpack shopping. Our website performance (or alleged) issues continued on. All of our research boils down to we don’t think there is anything wrong, or shall I say anything new wrong. We know our application needs to be improved. That is why the development team has spent over a year designing and building a next generation application. I think certain business people are missing there numbers and blaming the issue on a site problem. They got one bad metric and they stomp all over it. It has been a long week.

On another note I was just sitting down to figure out what I wanted to eat for dinner last night when I got a call from Jayson that an internal website was offline and someone called about it. Turns out several several servers where down. They where all plugged into the same switch module. I ended up having to go to our data center and meet Jayson to fix the issue. It was as simple as re-seating the module and it started working again. To be safe we moved all critical systems off that module onto another switch module. I didn’t get home until after 1AM today. So for a day off, I worked almost a full day’s work. Nice!!!