As of yesterday, new support tickets are now being handled in our new support system, which is powered by Request Tracker (RT). Hopefully from the outside, things look exactly as they did before: you email support@mythic-beasts.com, your request gets assigned a ticket number, and you get a timely and helpful response from our non-dedicated support team.

From the inside, this change is pretty daunting. Our support system is absolutely critical to our day-to-day work, and learning a new tool, and adapting all of our customer-facing process to use it is a big change. There are lots of little things like the canned “snippets” that we use when composing replies to common questions, and the processes to be followed when contacting customers in response to automated alerts. Doing this from a clean slate would be hard enough, but we also have to provide continuity for existing tickets, which can remain active for weeks, months or very occasionally, years.

We’ve been tackling the migration as incrementally as possible. Most internal, and certain external tickets have been handled in RT for some weeks now, but yesterday was the day that we flipped the switch on the support@ fire hose.

Our previous system has served us well for the 16 years that we’ve been using it, but it suffers from being closed source. There have been various enhancements that we’d like to have made, but we couldn’t, and ultimately our migration away from it has been forced by the fact that the standalone product is no longer maintained, having been replaced by SaaS version – an option that is out of the question for us.

Of course, not having access to the source code has made migrating away from it harder.

Open Source or bust

We actually evaluated RT a bit over twenty years ago, and decided that it wasn’t right for us, based mostly on some requirements that in hindsight seem a bit odd (RT has also matured a bit since then!) In selecting RT this time, we carried out a thorough evaluation of available ticketing systems, with one absolutely non-negotiable requirement: must be open source and hosted in house. We simply cannot afford for such a critical and hard-to-migrate part of our business to be locked in to closed source software, let alone a SaaS service.

Our primary goal with the new system so far has been to replicate the functionality that we had before, but once it is bedded in, we plan to make further enhancements to improve integration with our other software. Whilst in the short term we hope that you’ll see no change, in the long-term we hope that customers will see improvements to how we handle support.

We’re considering adding Request Tracker to our list of managed applications. Please drop us an email if this is something that you might be interested in.

We recently went to the UK IPv6 Council annual meeting, ten years since the first one. In the intervening time, IPv6 usage in the UK has grown from 0.2% of connections to 48% today; almost half the country is IPv6-enabled. There was lots of interesting material about IPv6-only and “IPv6 mostly” networks, in addition to dual-stack networks.

IPv6 Mostly

“IPv6 mostly” networks are dual stack networks that provide NAT64 and DNS64 servers. DNS64 provides synthesised IPv6 addresses for IPv4-only resources, and the NAT64 service then provides translation between the two. Some software is incompatible because it tries to talk directly to IPv4 addresses which can’t be reached. Modern computers and phones offer CLAT which bridges this gap. A network client using CLAT in a network that offers NAT64 and DNS64 no longer needs to be dual stack and can turn direct IPv4 off.

DHCP has a new option: Option 108: ‘IPv6-Only preferred’. About 75% of clients – mostly phones, tablets and OSX devices – will specify this option. When present on both server and client, the client won’t request an IPv4 address from the DHCP server, and will operate only with IPv6 addresses. Imperial College London have rolled this out on their wifi network. Of the 71,000 devices using their network, only 16,000 request an IPv4 address. 77% are IPv6-only.

IPv4 as a service

Sky rolled out a network in Italy which is internally IPv6-only, and IPv4 traffic is layered on top using MAP-T. This means the broadband box translates all IPv4 traffic into IPv6 as it enters the network, then a MAP box turns it back into IPv4 as it leaves the Sky network to get to the origin. IPv6 traffic skips both transitions. As a large eyeball network, they have network cache devices in their network. If the traffic flow is IPv4, it is terminated on the cache box in one of the four points key points-of-presence. IPv6 flows can terminate on cache boxes anywhere in the network – crucially closer and faster to the end user.

Other updates

Vodafone started and has nearly finished dual-stacking their network. The motivation was to reduce the IPv4 and carrier grade NAT costs. Today 75% of their customers have IPv6 and 38% of their traffic flows over IPv6. Microsoft talked about all their work on the operating system side to support and proxy IPv6, with the consensus being very clear that CLAT and DHCP option 108 was the most important thing they should have delivered last year.

We’ve long said that the greatest achievement of the modern tech industry is to lower standards so far that providing a service that works at all is regarded as exceptional service. One thing this implicitly includes is service cancellation. We believe in the extremely simple principle that if you don’t want or no longer require a service you can cancel it. If you don’t like the service you can move it to another provider – we implemented easy DNS import and export to make it easy to arrive or leave as a customer.

Our control panel allows you to cancel any or all of your services at the end of the billing period, with an optional note to explain why.

There’s no retentions team, you don’t have to fill in a paper form, there’s no huge contract lock in period, you don’t need a doctors note or a letter from your Mum or to be passed around five different departments and we won’t find a mysterious term in a 150 page long contract that insist on you paying for another two decades. We also don’t waste your time with seemingly infinite customer satisfaction surveys where you can rate us from one smiley to nine stars.

We welcome the new US government legislation to require all providers to match our simple cancellation process. As a company owned by founders and staff we are still guided by our desire to offer services good enough that we would willingly want to pay for them.

We’ve always taken a boringly old-fashioned approach to our domain registration business. We take the price that our supplier charges us, add a little bit more than it costs us to provide the service and sell them on. The price we charge covers the cost of providing support, DNS, and other things like foreign exchange and payment fees.

We don’t do introductory “loss-leaders” – selling domains at a loss for the initial period and then ramping up the price for renewals^*. Our domain business isn’t a loss leader for other services, and we don’t offer barely-profitable prices that need to be subsidised by high margin add-ons that you don’t really need.

In fact, our domain pricing structure is so boring, that we wrote a simple script to do it for us. It pulls in wholesale prices from our supplier via an API, takes the current exchange rate, adds our margin, and sets our list prices.

When we set our current price structure, there were only a small number of Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) and they were mostly a similar price. Country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) are often more expensive, but they’re also often more bureaucratic and more expensive to support.

These days there’s a huge number of gTLDs with a huge range in price, with some gTLDs costing hundreds of pounds per year and the assumption that the more expensive domains are those with greater bureaucracy no longer holds.

In recognition of this, we’ve just rolled out a significant update to our pricing structure that better models our costs. The net result is that we’ve reduced the price of all non-UK domains with a one-year cost of more than £30+VAT and we’ve also increased the discount we offer for multi-year renewals and registrations across all domains.

You can view our updated prices at mythic-beasts.com/domains

The price reductions apply to renewals and transfers as well as new registrations, and as always, existing customers get the same prices as new customers.

All domain registrations include our DNS service, with a powerful DNS API, and support for DNSSEC (where supported by the gTLD).

Our sustainable pricing model means we have no need for nasty lock-in schemes. We’ve never charged transfer-out fees, and our DNS service makes it really to import and export your DNS records.

^* Registries do sometimes offer promotional first year pricing.  In this case, we will pass on these discounts, but make the normal price clear in our price list.

This year the back-end system for domain names ending in .gov.uk has migrated from JISC (the organisation that provides connectivity services to Higher Education in the UK) to Nominet (the organisation responsible for nearly all other .uk domains).

This brings a few significant changes for registrars who offer .gov.uk domain names:

• There are enhanced security requirements for registrars. Nominet requires Cyber Essentials.
• The wholesale costs have been reduced.
• Registration periods other than 2 years are now possible.
• All the processes and procedures are different: somethings are now easier, others are harder.

Mythic Beasts were already Nominet members and have now added the ability to register .gov.uk domain names through Nominet. All of our existing .gov.uk domain name customers have been migrated across transparently. We have also applied a price decrease, renewals are now £15+VAT rather than £75+VAT, and new domain registrations have also been reduced from £150+VAT for the first two years, to £89.50+VAT.

We’re aware that a number of registrars have opted not to continue offering .gov.uk domains due to the procedure changes and security requirements. We are able to accept transfers of .gov.uk domains in, and there is no charge for transferring a domain name to us. We can also accept payment by bank transfer on account which is extremely helpful for government bodies that register .gov.uk domains.

The transfer process is very simple, set up an account at the Mythic Beasts control panel and go to transfer domain in. It will ask you for the authorisation code and we’ll complete the transfer for you.

As of March 2023 there were 3854 .gov.uk domains in use – if every registrar follows our lead that should reduce the government deficit by around £200,000/year.

At the end of July, Debian 10 (Buster) reached end-of-life, and with it, all mainstream support for Python 2. The Python Software Foundation actually ended support for Python 2 on 1st January 2020, but it’s remained in Debian until now because a small number of important packages depend on it.

One of those packages is Mailman 2, a widely-used mailing list manager.  For various reasons, many projects using Mailman 2 have resisted upgrading to its successor, Mailman 3.  With Debian 10 reaching end-of-life, we’re seeing renewed interest in this migration.

One of the barriers to migrating to Mailman 3 is that the upgrade breaks links to messages in the mailing list archives.  There are links all over the internet to messages in Mailman 2 list archives, and for many projects, breaking these links would be a significant loss.

We’ve recently done some Mailman 2 to 3 migrations, and as part of this, we developed our own solution to preserving archive URLs.  We created a script that trawls Mailman 2 archives and creates a map of old URLs in the Mailman 2 archives to the corresponding URL in the Mailman 3 archives.  This can be used by Apache’s mod_rewrite to generate redirects for the old URLs.   The map can be converted to a DBM file for more efficient lookups.  This is important for archives containing many thousands of URLs.

We’ve made the mailman-archive-mapper script freely available on GitHub.

We offer mailman as a managed application.

 

Last month we attended Electromagnetic Field as a silver sponsor.  Despite being in a remote field in Herefordshire, the site had amazing connectivity, which we played a small part in providing.

We provided some optics to help get internet around the field and acted as an Internet Transit Provider to uplink the festival through our network.

We had a tour of the network operations centre. ElectromagneticField leased a single fibre to a telephone exchange in Gloucester and a donated private 40Gbps circuit hauls the traffic back to the London Network Access Point (LONAP). We used private VLANS over LONAP to link to the Mythic Beasts core network routers in Sovereign House and Telehouse and used this to provide our blend of transit providers and peers, including direct access over private fibre to some of the largest cloud providers.

The section from the field in Eastnor to Gloucester uses Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, a neat technology that uses multiple different frequencies to carry multiple signals on the same fibre at the same time. Each optical transceiver typically transmits at a specific wavelength on one fibre, and receives on the same wavelength on a second fibre. This is put into a multiplexer which combines the different frequencies from multiple optics into the same fibre and a second multiplexer splits them back out into the component frequencies at the other end, allowing multiple 10Gbps channels to operate over one fibre pair.

We use the same technique to multiply up the bandwidth in our core London network on our leased fibre that interconnects our core London points of presence.

To keep costs down at EMF there isn’t a fibre pair – just a single 60km fibre. The hack to get around this limitation is to use different frequencies in each direction and rely on the fact that the transceivers are frequency-specific for transmitting but not receiving – a transmitter that transmits at 1572.48nm will happily receive at 1572.89nm and vice versa. You can then use eight channels on one fibre as four bi-directional channels.

Around the campsite there were datenklo (a switch in a portaloo) which provided wifi and multiple 1Gbps wired uplinks. Each dataklo had a 10Gbps link back to the network operations centre to provide super-fast connectivity all around the site.

You can read more about some of the awesome things we saw at EMF 2024 in our previous blog post.

We went to Electromagnetic Field 2024 as a silver sponsor. Whilst there we found a lot of fantastic fun things and missed a vast number of others. The really amazing part of the festival was the massive variety of things the participants brought with them. Lock picking and blacksmithing courses were available. Geodesic domes were very popular and courses on how to build them were at the Maths Village. At least one dome integrated with the API from the bar, so the lighting changed colour based on what type of drinks were currently being ordered.

If you thought that ethernet and IP was a bit too modern there was a fully functioning DECT cordless phone network and you could access the live schedule information over ViewData (Prestel/Minitel).

We missed at least 98% of the talks. Fascinating ones we did see included a comprehensive explanation of the attempt to backdoor ssh with xzutils by Dr Matthew Garrett. Dr Matthew Bothwell gave a guide to Astrophysics for Supervillains covering things like ‘what happens if I crash the moon into the earth?’ (answer: you get a moon). Tim Hunkin of the Secret Life of Machines gave a short history of electric shocks and Ian B Dunne played the Theramin and musical saw. Much to our surprise, this was quite listenable.

Sadly the magic smoke came out of the Tesla Coil before the end so we had to make do with fire and lasers in additional to a traditional light show around the DJ area in the Null zone.

But this is a short summary, there was a fantastic kids creche, swap shop, night market for created things, crochet, hand built guitars, paper rockets, active satellite tracking, a 5km run, a fully stocked bar, a manual version of flappy bird to play and and and [approximately 100,000 further words cut to keep this post merely far beyond reasonable]

The now notorious swap shop gets a special mention. Not only did it have extremely dangerous materials like Linux install CDs from the late 1990s that may permanently corrupt young minds but some things that are rather harder to get hold of.

It has a direct entry on wikipedia and is going to cause a lot of festivals to have to update their terms and conditions to prohibit bringing radioactive materials to the site. Fortunately an attendee was familiar with safe disposal procedure and quickly removed the offending sources.

The last and arguably best thing at Electromagnic Field was an incredibly secretive project, the Great Camp Hexpansion Question (GCHQ.net). This was a series of locations (mostly, but not all static) where you could plug the quest markers into the official badge which would record you’d found them. A cross between a scavenger hunt and a technology preview it encouraged wandering and looking around the whole camp to find many cool things that were tucked away.

We asked the organisers if this was an official GCHQ sanctioned project. They said no. But that’s what you’d expect GCHQ would say.

Keen to build on our previous success at being outstanding in a field, for 2024 we’ve set ourselves a tough new target of being out standing in two completely different fields.

The Cambridge Beer Festival is being held this week on Jesus Green in Cambridge. A beer festival is pretty easy to organise: you need some virtual servers to handle the website and tickets, fibre to the field to give fast reliable connectivity for verifying tickets and accepting contactless payments, and perhaps satellite backup just in-case someone digs through the primary fibre.

There are also some other minor logistical requirements like a large quantity of beer, wine, mead, cider and other drinks, a very large marquee to keep it in,  a very large refrigeration system to keep the beer at cellar temperature, a huge cheese stall, a small army of volunteers and a makeshift road system to avoid damaging the park.

Mythic Beasts are providing the virtual servers and the internet transit to keep it all functioning.

Two weeks later, many of our staff are going to Electromagnetic Field. This is a camping festival with power and high speed internet to every tent, good beer and all kinds of amazing installations and demonstrations. In addition to being silver sponsors of the event, Mythic Beasts also donate internet transit and have sent a few sets of bidirectional fibre optics to carry traffic around the site.

If you’re going to be at either event, do come and say hello.  If you don’t know what we look like, drop an email to support or message us on social.mythic-beasts.com.

We’re pleased to announce that we are silver sponsors of this year’s Electromagnetic Field festival.  As in previous years, we will also continue to support the event with free transit.  EMF is a long weekend camping in a field where people who are really very interested in things will tell you about the things that really interest them. There’s talks, demos, art installations and workshops on all kinds of creative things. In addition to camping, everyone gets power and high speed internet to their tent. Rumour has it there is also a bar.

Previous years have had an exceptionally wide variety of talks on a huge number of different subjects. The list of talks from the last festival in 2022 is long, but includes things as wild as:

• Ship vs Oil Rig
• The imitation game – using live data feeds from Network Rail to control a model railway
• Building a home-made enigma machine

We’re not giving a talk this year as we didn’t come up with a good idea in time. For 2026 we’ve already rejected the following presentation titles :

• I’ve got 99 problems and HEX ain’t one.
• D. E. P. R. E. C. I. 8. The importance of correct accounting policies delivered through the medium of Aretha Franklin covers.
• As a large language model I can’t assist with that. It’s illegal, unethical, and against my guidelines.

We’re looking forward to meeting up with lots of interesting people at EMF2024.