Mythic Beasts is too fast for the youth of today.

January 13th, 2012 by

At about 6pm this evening I’d just finished loading up a car to take some more servers to the data centre and rescue a customer who’d broken their server. As I did so a person with a black hood pulled over their head opened the back door of my car, grabbed my laptop bag and made a run for it.

Unfortunately for the opportunist, I’m a passable distance runner and I happened to be wearing the new running shoes which I’m breaking in. So I chased him hoping my stamina would lead him to tire and eventually I’d catch him.

Despite his apparent age advantage and his head start, after 225m (I measured it afterwards) it was obvious I was going to catch him so he dropped my laptop and continued to run away. I took the bait and retrieved my laptop rather than catching him and beating him to a pulp which in many ways would have been more satisfying.

Reflecting on the experience I have to say that was a lousy performance on the thief’s part, it should have taken me at least a mile to catch him. Why would you go into the smash and grab robbery business without learning how to run quickly first? As a result I’ve made a small donation to the Cambridge Parkrun because it’s nice that someone is attempting to do something to improve youth fitness because it seems they bloody well need it.

10 Gigabit networking in SOV & HEX

January 12th, 2012 by

Over the weekend of January the 7th and January the 8th we upgraded our core routers in Sovereign House and Harbour Exchange. Previously Sovereign House had a 2x1GE bonded uplink into each router, with each router having 1G of transit and 1G of peering (different peering exchange and transit provider on each router). Now we have a 10GE ring around the two routers and the core switches and lots of spare 1G and 10GE ports on the routers so we can bring additional transit and peers online easily in the future.

The router upgrade was completed almost without issue, there was a brief period in the early hours of Sunday morning with incorrect configuration for one /24 in Sovereign House and our IPv6 gateway in Sovereign House was offline for an extended period because we hadn’t configured it to advertise correctly. Aside from those issues we were able to replace each router in succession relying on the redundancy provided by the other router to seamlessly fail over between them as they were replaced.

We’re happy to report that Cambridge customers didn’t observe a 12 hour outage with our Cambridge to Sovereign House connection on Friday 6th, everything correct rerouted via Harbour Exchange resulting only in a momentary blip when the connection failed catastrophically mid afternoon. Normal redundancy was restored in the early hours of Saturday morning after a large section of fibre had been replaced.

IPv6 glue for .com/.net/.org

January 5th, 2012 by

We’ve now implemented IPv6 glue for .com / .net / .org domains through our control panel and other country codes that support glue records.