February 2002 - Test - lists.nanog.org

Re: NetFlow collector..
by Peter Phaal 06 Feb '02

06 Feb '02

On Sun Feb 03 00:43:03 2002, Alex Rubenstein asked: >I have been looking around for a while now, for a piece of software that >can sit on a *nix box, and simply export netflows from a promiscuous mode >media adapter. >For instance; I've become used to using the ip flow-aggregation stuff >(specificall for AS), as follows: >ip flow-aggregation cache as > export destination x.x.x.y 4444 > enabled >Problem being tho, that on the 6509/MSFC2/PFC platform, to use this, you >have to raise the traffic flow out of hardware-switched PFC to MSFC >software switching/routing. >What I'd like to do is take a unix box, with a gig-e or whatnot interface, >mirror traffic to it, and let it generate the flow's to be collected by >another machine. >Anyone got some pointers, or insight? How are others doing AS flows? InMon sFlow Probe <http://www.inmon.com/probes.htm> is a commercial product that can generate full NetFlow v5 records. It uses iBGP to get AS information from the router. Detailed AS-path data can be exported using sFlow (RFC 3176) <http://www.sflow.org/>. Peter

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Extreme & Foundry mailing lists
by Philip Plant 06 Feb '02

06 Feb '02

Hi folks, Back in October, Rich Sena asked whether there were any dedicated mailing lists for people using Extreme Networks equipment. I thought that it would be a useful independent forum to have, so I've setup a list for Extreme users, and also one for Foundry users. If you'd like to join, send mail to majordomo(a)greenfinch.com with either or both of the following lines in the main body of the message: subscribe extreme subscribe foundry Cheers, Philip.

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Re: Reducing Usenet Bandwidth
by Vadim Antonov 05 Feb '02

05 Feb '02

USENET is by its nature a commons facility for sharing rivalrous resources (e.g. bandwidth and storage capacity). Some elementary reasoning (if anyone's interested, Lawrence Lessig's "The Future of Ideas" contains as detailed discussion as anyone can bear :) leads to the conclusion that such commons lacking usage control mechanisms are doomed to disintegrate. No exceptions to this rule were found so far. (The usage control mechanisms do not have to be market-based to be effective and successful; public policy or code may embed usage controls as well - the cooperative congestion control in TCP is an excellent example). When the Internet was small, personal reputation was strong enough limiter to abuse of these shared resources. Howevber, it only works when a community is smallish and elitary. It is clearly no longer the case with USENET. In other words - USENET cannot be fixed with technological improvements as long as the root problem (lack of admission control) is not solved. Improving transmission or storage systems would only let spammers to push more spam for free (and to reduce S/N ratio even further). I'd say it is time to declare USENET defunct. It was fun while it lasted. --vadim PS: Talking about commons... A lot of network and computing resources are quite under-utilized. Many owners of those resources would be quite willing to donate underused capacity to the community - providing that such donation will not have any noticeable negative impact on resources' performance on primary tasks. While most modern OS-es have mostly adequate prioritization mechanisms, a lot of would-be donors are turned out by the effective inability to protect their primary network capacity. Therefore, i would like to ask ISPs to be civic-minded and standartize on an IP TOS for "community" traffic, giving normal IP traffic an absolute queueing and drop-policy preference over packets with community TOS. Most backbone (and some access) IP routing equipment already has everything needed to implement community TOS, the equipment vendors could be similarly civic-minded by making such preference turned on by default and by improving per-TOS utilization data collection, so NMS-es won't cry wolf seeing links being highly utilized by low-priority traffic. Another area which needs improvement is making L2 switches similarly aware of community TOS in IP packets.

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Re: Reducing Usenet Bandwidth
by rs＠seastrom.com 05 Feb '02

05 Feb '02

Simon Lyall <simon.lyall(a)ihug.co.nz> writes: > On Sun, 3 Feb 2002, Marco d'Itri wrote: > > > The major drawback of that protocol is that it limits articles size to > > 64KB, so it does not reduce binary traffic, which is the largest part > > of a newsfeed. > > In which case you just modify the protocol (or roll your own) to have > articles spread across multiple packets. It's not that hard and our guys > did this and I expect it's been done (at least) half a dozen times by > other people. It was trivial when I did it as a testbed for my previous boss (sorry, not open-source). If you compress the article before sending (we used libz, and at the time a 1 GHz PIII (the fastest machine we could get) kept up with the 28mbps full feed just fine), a truly startling percentage of articles (I want to say 78%) fit in a single packet on the ethernet... 1500 bytes minus udp encap and non-compressed header data, which includes stuff like local article sequence number, part number for multipacket articles, md5 checksum of article, and message-id. Of course, those little articles are not the ones that are eating your bandwidth, but even so I found that to be quite interesting. Our software was nowhere near as complex as the UUnet software (just point-to-multipoint), and probably quite similar to Cidera's software. Worked pretty well over satellite too. Of course, the dirty little not-so-secret is that for all the hacks that people have done over the years, inter-AS multicast that doesn't get hosed at the drop of a hat remains an elusive goal(1). Thinking about doing multicast Usenet feeds as a way to cut down the bandwidth in and out of your ISP overlooks the fact that reliable transport for such things doesn't exist. I'm sorry if I've offended anyone with this (uncharitable) assessment. ---Rob (1): http://beaconserver.accessgrid.org:9999/

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RE: InterNAP - any comments?
by Miguel de Leon Dimayuga 05 Feb '02

05 Feb '02

in their early years, they were fairly pricey for the performance gain that you'd get. we did some testing and we didn't think the 10-20% performance gain we got using their link compared to connecting to a Tier-1 provider, warranted the 50%-100% additional we had to pay for it. i haven't had the change to look at their performance recently - but in talking to some of their techies, they seem to have done a great deal of improvement from their early software implementation. i don't know their current pricing scheme, but you might want to do some testing for yourself to see if the % gain is worth the % premium. assuming that the answer to the above testing is positive, it seems that internap might make sense for those that ... a: put a premium on performance and can't afford multiple upstream connections. btw, a backup connection/second provider is always a GoodThingTM and a single internap connection is still a single point of failure. b: those entities with multiple sites they want to interconnect (e.g. large corporations with different offices in the cities where internap is). you might want to look into their frac DS3 service for this. my $0.02... Miguel de Leon Dimayuga God does not ask us to be successful, Networks & Technologies only to be faithful. Cbeyond Communications -Mother Teresa of Calcutta

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RE: InterNAP - any comments?
by Rishi Singh 05 Feb '02

05 Feb '02

Very good. At point we had three DS3s going to them. Now we're down to one DS3 circuit. Very reliable service, very clueful NOC, excellent notification of all work performed ahead of time, circuit outages, BGP flaps etc.. Been with them for three years now. -----Original Message----- From: matthew zeier [mailto:matthew@velvet.org] Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 3:04 PM To: nanog(a)nanog.org Subject: InterNAP - any comments? I'm looking at InterNAP as a provider. Anyone have any comments on them? -- matthew zeier - "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." - Johann von Neumann

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Experience with Inflow IDCs ?
by matthew zeier 04 Feb '02

04 Feb '02

I'm looking for anyone with any comments regarding Inflow's datacenters. I'm also concerned about financial stability - their website only has their annual report for 2000. Their business plan looks strikingly similar to other companies that have recently gone bankrupt. Anyone know anything to instill some confidence in me? -- matthew zeier - "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." - Johann von Neumann

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Fwd: SlashDot: "Comcast Gunning for NAT Users"
by Martin J. Levy 04 Feb '02

04 Feb '02

I got this forwarded to me. I'm not impressed. Based upon the general desire for providers to have NAT'ed users and to reduce IP-space usage where appropriate, does this make sense? I can understand the providers desire to increase revenue, but I don't believe this is a good way to do it. Besides the technical difficulties of detecting a household that is running a NAT'ed router, why not win over the customer with a low-cost extra IP address vs: the customers one-time hardware cost for the router. There are people who would be willing to pay some amount monthly vs: (let's say) $100 for a NAT box. Does anyone know what percentage of home broadband users run NAT? Does anyone have stats for IP-addresses saved by using NAT? Martin ------ Forwarded Message From: Ward Clark <ward(a)joyofmacs.com> Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 15:00:32 -0500 To: "NetTalk" <nettalk(a)sustworks.com> Subject: SlashDot: "Comcast Gunning for NAT Users" Today's MacInTouch links to a report that appeared in SlashDot on Thursday: "A co-worker of mine resigned today. His new job at Comcast: Hunting down 'abusers' of the service. More specifically, anyone using NAT to connect more than one computer to their cable modem to get Internet access- whether or not you're running servers or violating any other Acceptable Use Policies. Comcast has an entire department dedicated to eradicating NAT users from their network. ... did anyone think they'd already be harassing people that are using nothing more than the bandwidth for which they are paying? ..." Earthlink and Comcast have both been advertising lately their single-household, multi-computer services (and additional fees) -- probably amusing to many thousands of broadband-router owners, at least until the cable companies really crack down. There's a huge number of responses (691 at the moment), which I quickly scanned out of curiosity. I'm not a Comcast or Earthlink user. You can start here: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/01/24/1957236.shtml -- ward -------------------- To unsubscribe <mailto:requests@sustworks.com> with message body "unsubscribe nettalk" ------ End of Forwarded Message

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InterNAP - any comments?
by matthew zeier 04 Feb '02

04 Feb '02

I'm looking at InterNAP as a provider. Anyone have any comments on them? -- matthew zeier - "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." - Johann von Neumann

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RE: Reducing Usenet Bandwidth
by Rowland, Alan D 04 Feb '02

04 Feb '02

Most (reputable American) ISPs are signatories to the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Not lawsuit necessary, just notification. -Al Just my 2¢, feel free to use your delete key. -----Original Message----- From: Simon Lyall [mailto:simon.lyall@ihug.co.nz] Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2002 2:47 PM To: nanog(a)merit.edu Subject: Re: Reducing Usenet Bandwidth On 3 Feb 2002, Paul Vixie wrote: > Pull it, rather than pushing it. nntpcache is a localized example of how [...] Proposed by someone every couple of months for the last 10 years (at least). The current software (diablo especially) even supports it to a good extent, however nobody is doing it for some reason. > Pushing netnews, with or without multicast, with or without binaries, is > just unthinkable at today's volumes but we do it anyway. The effect of > increased volume have decreased the utilization of netnews as a media > amongst my various friends. Totally wrong on the non-binaries feed bit. A non-binaries feed is around 1-2GB per day or 100-200kb/s which is below the noise level for anyone on this list. Even on the semi 3rd world wages I make I could afford a non-binaries feed to my house and archive it for less than I spend on lunches. Binaries on the other hand is completely different, most people can't afford it and we are moving to a centralized model with the supernews types companies being the only ones with full feeds out there. I am really surprised that the RIAA and similar groups havn't "gone after" usenet to any great degree yet. I can't really see how binaries newsgroups different in any great extent (from the copyright angle) from your random p2p network. Once a few lawsuits are issued (does the ISC count as a distributor?) against the dozen or so top news providers things could be quite interesting. -- Simon Lyall. | Newsmaster | Work: simon.lyall(a)ihug.co.nz Senior Network/System Admin | Postmaster | Home: simon(a)darkmere.gen.nz ihug, Auckland, NZ | Asst Doorman | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz

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