Mythic Beasts have added paypal functionality to our billing system. You can now pay by credit or debit card, paypal, direct debit, BACS transfer or even cheque. Just don’t post us an envelope full of used fivers – save those for the sorts of services where you don’t get a VAT invoice.
If you’re a Debian Developer and you’re going to the annual Debian UK Barbeque we hope to see you there, and give you a beer to thank you for your hard work.
Nat Morris, UK Network Operators Forum director recently gave a presentation to DNS Operations, Analysis and Research centre, which included this remarkably nice slide:
Normally a server has a globally unique IP address, and the Internet knows how to send traffic from any other machine in the world to that IP address. With Anycast we share a single address across multiple machines, and your traffic is sent to the nearest machine with that address. This means that UK customers can be answered from a server in the UK and Australian customers from a server in Australia allowing you to have very fast responses to things like DNS queries because you’re always served by a server that’s close by, rather than your query having to travel half way around the world.
To set up an Anycast network, you need your own address space, your own network number (ASN), multiple BGP-aware routers that can announce your address space, and multiple servers that can answer the queries. Typically this would require a pretty hefty budget, but if you’re Nat Morris and you know what you’re doing with software routing on Linux, and you know all the right providers then you can bring up a global Anycast network with 10+ servers and sites on an annual budget of well under $1,000.
The key to doing this is finding ISPs, ideally well-connnected ISPs in key internet hubs, who will provide you with a BGP feed to your hosted server. That’s where a UK clueful hosting company comes into the picture having excellent connectivity, inexpensive virtual machines (VMs) and a willingness to support customers with more unusual configurations.
Normally when you have a VM you get a default route, which looks like this:
# ip route ... default via 93.93.128.1 dev eth1
which says that to get to anywhere on the internet, send packets to our router at 93.93.128.1.
Over BGP, instead we send you the whole routing table:
# ip route ... 1.0.7.0/24 via 5.57.80.128 dev eth3.4 proto zebra metric 1 1.0.20.0/23 via 93.93.133.46 dev eth6.220 proto zebra metric 142080 ... 500,000 more lines like this
For every block on the whole internet you have a different gateway depending on what you’ve decided is the preferred route. At today’s count this is about 490,000 entries in the routing table. Don’t type ‘route’ if you’re logged in over 3G!
So for this VM, instead of having a default route, Nat has four full BGP sessions, two to each of our two routers to the site. On each router, one session provides 490,000 IPv4 routes, the other provides 18,000 IPv6 routes, and the VM gets to decide which router to send data to.
The other side of the BGP relationship, and the important bit for Anycasting, is that we receive an advert from Nat’s VM for his /24 of IPv4 space and /48 of IPv6 space, which we then advertise out to the world. The 10+ other providers in this Anycast setup will do the same, and hosts will direct traffic to whichever is nearest.
As Paul Vixie pointed out in the first question to Nat, the main customers of VMs with BGP are spammers who hijack address space for nefarious usage. At Mythic Beasts we filter our announcements and our customer routes, so if Nat messes up his configuration and accidentally announces that his VM is responsible for the whole of Youtube we’ll drop the announcement rather than expecting one very small VM to handle one fifth of the internet.
If you’re a DNS provider or a content delivery network, you’ll probably want to have an Anycast setup at some point. At Mythic Beasts we remember what it was like to be the little guy which is why we offer full BGP routing (including IPv6 BGP) as an option to any virtual server, dedicated server, colocated server or router. Providing you own your own ASN and IP space we can transit it for you and we can keep the start-up costs very low and scale with you. You can locate your VM or server directly with us in Telecity, mere tens of metres from LINX and LoNAP for minimal latency and maximal available bandwidth.
If you’ve no idea what an ASN, BGP, LIR, RIPE are, we can help arrange your ASN, IP space and BGP config.
On Monday, one of our founders Pete is going to run the Boston Marathon which was the site of a terrible terrorist incident last year. You defeat terrorism by not being scared and not changing your plans, so despite the massive security inconvenience he’s gone anyway.
Last week Pete went for a run around the London Marathon course with Jeremy and Chris, as they’d always planned to turn up and together. Sadly Chris wasn’t able to make it because a fatal brain tumour in 2012 has set back his training quite badly – it’s not looking promising he’ll make the start line next year either.
So if you were feeling charitable, and wanted to win a Mythic Beasts Mug, you could make a donation to cancer research at Jeremy’s fund raising page, putting your time prediction in as a comment in the form
MB account-number 3:15:30
If you get the closest result to his finishing time we’ll send you a very limited edition Mythic Beasts Mug.
If you want some information to guide your mug winning entry, all of Pete’s training from January to March was curtailed with a foot injury. his first run back was the Cambridge Half Marathon (1:39), and last week in London did a final training run with a hang over and toilet break in 3:27:22. Last year when on form he ran 2:59:28 again in London. Boston has hills and the course is a straight line so wind conditions can make a big difference.
With DynDNS shutting down their free dynamic DNS service quite a few customers contacted us to ask for an upgrade to our DNS API so that it can effortlessly substitute in for DynDNS. For example we saw this request over twitter.
@Mythic_Beasts dyndns is closing its free dynamic dns service (*major internet trauma*). Could you write a blog post about what MB offers?
— David Earl (@frankshad) April 8, 2014
Several people offered a suggested implementation. They all asked for something along these lines,
Can you make it so that when you put an update for an A record through
it can substitute in the calling IP address instead of supplying one.
It’s clear that many of our customers still don’t instinctively get the implications of dual stack hosting yet.
In particular if you call the API from a v6 address and ask for an update to your A record it will fail because it doesn’t know your v4 address. Similarly if you call it from a v4 address and ask for an update to your AAAA record, it will also fail for precisely the same reason. You have to call the API to update your A or AAAA record over the correct v4/v6 channel in order to get the correct update, and if you’re dual stack you need to call it twice.
We decided that we should fasttrack this project, and gave it to Liam Fraser – who’s back with us during his Easter holidays. We’re proud to present our fully documented and enhanced Dynamic DNS API which sample code for single (v4 or v6) and dual (v4 and v6) stack hosts.
We include our DNS API free of charge for anyone who’s bought a domain name from us, so if you’d like to use our Dynamic DNS service, create an account at our control panel and follow the instructions.
If you’re bored of working for a company where you can’t get things done, and would like to work somewhere where you can implement, test, document and release a small enhancement in about six hours, you can apply for a job with us here. We’re especially interested in talented graduates and school leavers who know their Linux.
How to bring up remote desktop on Mac OS X without having a mouse so that you can operate the machine remotely:
option + spacebar, type terminal
This opens spotlight and starts a terminal.
sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on
This enables ssh so you can log in remotely.
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent -privs -all
This enables remote desktop so you can log in from another mac, and use the mouse on that one to finish the rest of your configuration.
The Tower Bridge Lifeboat station put up a picture on Twitter of what London would look like today if the Thames Barrier wasn’t closed.
I’ve annotated it with the four biggest nodes from the London Internet Exchange.
It’s not known exactly what fraction of UK Internet traffic passes through these four buildings, but almost every major ISP or content provider exchanges traffic there, Mythic Beasts, Facebook, Twitter, Google, BT, Virgin, Yahoo, Microsoft, Akamai, Netflix, Talktalk, BSkyB, Vodafone, and hundreds of others. Very slowly regional exchanges are starting to be built, largely by LINX itself.
This morning one of our routers in our Cambridge data centre stopped reporting bandwidth data to our billing system. We investigated and whilst it was still routing packets without issue, it appeared to be experiencing hardware failure.
We’ve powered the router down, pending full investigation on our data centre visit this afternoon. Currently all traffic from our Cambridge site is being handled by our other router. This seamlessly failed over with no customer impact.
Depending on your choice of terminology ‘Redundancy has been reduced to N’, or ‘The network is at-risk’. In Mythic Beasts we like to speak English so this translates to, if something else fails before the router is restored to service, there is a risk of a network outage to our Cambridge data centre.
Update : Friday 31st we fully restored our network to it’s usual redundant configuration by replacing the router with a similarly over specified replacement. Customers may have received free bandwidth for some of this period.
Here’s an unsolicited customer review of a migration of a dedicated server to one of our managed virtual machines from Alex at raspi.tv who’s building a 9inch HDMI 1080p screen.
New Year, New Server At mythic Beasts
You can find the original twitter conversation at @Mythic_Beasts.
Our latest blog post is on the Raspberry Pi website. Coping with Christmas