does arp have a looking glass? Wat? a mirror? :) dxtr: you know, a queriable BGP server type thing so you can see how the internet appears from the prespective of different places on the internet why would arp need one? RandalSchwartz: I guess it's just a 'nice to help' but personally I don't see the point in every provider doing it Yeah - how many different views do you need? :) you can also just traceroute yourself. I do that a lot. I'm a new customer, and would have found one useful to see how a VPS at arp would route traffic to various places before I signed up since it varies from day to day, how does that help? RandalSchwartz: there are useful aspects though, but as I said, I don't see the point in every provider doing it BGP shouldn't really be that unstable if you make purchase decisions based on a particuler view one afternoon, I think you're missing the picture. :0 plett - arp has a lot of redundant links so yes - it does vary, with load, with what's up vs down, etc. RandalSchwartz: Looking Glasses seem to only be of any use if stuff is broken and if stuff is broken, up_the_irons should be fixing it. not waiting for us to diagnose it remotely :) RandalSchwartz: I'm talking in a general sense I generally do too. :) and who's to say the brokenness is up_the_irons' fault I didn't say that RandalSchwartz: Indeed. I have seen the lists of peers on arp's website. It's the details of how it would be routed in the normal situation of all transits and peerings being up that I would have been interested in plett - again, depending on load. :) there is some sort of ASN mapper out there. plett: why not traceroute from the other end? ok - time to go get on a plane from Porto Alegre to Rio. G: I did. The routing is asymetric in some cases RandalSchwartz: BGP doesn't include the load on the links when chosing a route for a prefix, unless arp are doing something non-standard Routes to the UK (which is mostly what I'm interested in) improved quite a lot when arp added PacketExchange/mzima/GTT/whoever_they_are_today transit A looking glass at ARP's end would let me see where it would go if the PacketExchange path were down, etc plett: hah it's mzima routing that's borken for me well i mean suboptimal i was wondering how much it's preferred by and what my transit provider is doing it used to be fine oh actually it was only mzima foward path to the vps reverse path is via trit.net i dunno who trit.net is mzima seems to be forward path going via paix. it's easier to change forward-path routing than reverse-path routing though https://www.trit.net/corp/ wow web site coming soon mercutio: From here in the UK, it's mzima in both directions and a nice short route. It helps that we peer with PacketExchange/mzima in London, and ARP has transit from them in LAX plett: what's short? like what latency? i have a uk vps hmm it goes via mzima 150msec I was meaning hop count rather than latency, but I get 160ms from my ADSL at home that's not too bad i suppose i'm in new zealand Ironically, IPv6 is consistently 20ms lower - 140ms rather than 160 my latency was around 126 msec not including dsl segment now it's like 167 not including dsl segment dsl is around 10 msec plett: that happens soemtimes with one provider that i used to use it's 133 msec frmo uk anyway the difference between 169 msec and 126 msec is actually noticable IPv6 being lower latency is mostly just down to "everyone using HE" but i realise that it's probably from my transit provider having fucked routing now hmm he.net is good in osome ways not very reliable but some of their routing is pretty good although on some paths it can vary like going via denver/chi or phoenix/dallas/atlanta We only get v6 from them in London as they peer for free i usd to think he.net was just a budget lame provider oh yip i've got he.net tunnel I have no knowledge of what their v4 routes are like to the uk they're pretty good hmm 155msec frmo san jose that's not that good oh that's right they're better from la to uk then san jose san jose goes via ashville/paris los angles gos via new york/london i dropped the la provider that used he.net due to excessive packet loss though don't think it was he.net's doing though 3. lonap.he.net 0.0% 8 10.2 2.8 1.3 10.2 3.1 4. 10gigabitethernet4-4.core1.nyc4.he.net 0.0% 8 70.6 72.4 69.3 79.4 3.9 5. 10gigabitethernet8-3.core1.chi1.he.net 0.0% 8 86.7 87.2 86.6 88.9 1.0 6. 10gigabitethernet3-2.core1.den1.he.net 0.0% 8 119.6 111.8 110.3 119.6 3.2 7. 10gigabitethernet1-4.core1.lax2.he.net 0.0% 8 132.7 134.2 132.5 142.0 3.3 but athat's what their london to los angeles routing is like who was it before mzima? Originally it was all PacketExchange, then they created the mzima name for transit nah i meant that arp was using Oh, It used two or three different transit providers to them from here I don't know about the other direction, as I didn't have anything at arp at that point really packet loss makes more diff than latency like 5% packet loss is worse than 40msec more latency Looking at the BGP tables from the London end, every transit feed we have has picked packetexchange as its best route to arp heh And for v6, everyone (apart from Level3 of course) uses HE to get to arp what do your transit tables say for best route to 202.49.71.59? (my IP in new zealand) it mostly goes via cogent from uk i think to me Only if the UK isp is using cogent, I would assume No short route to 202.49.71.59. Best route from my view in the UK is via Level3 - 3356 4648 4610 17746 9559 i dunno it may be peered hmm i'm guessing cogent is one of those asnumbers oh hey it's not No, Cogent is 174 do you get less than 300 msec ping? That's Level3 -> Netgate -> Odyssey -> Orcon -> Plain Communications yip None of those names mean anything to me, they all look .nz to me :) heh 295ms netgate is big provider here odyssey is pretty much transit of orcon orcon is upstream plain communications is a small isp i work at 295 msec yeh.. I also work for a small ISP, but in the UK :) that's where latency gets annoying :) ahh ok do you do many diff things ?/ it's weird with big companies how people like really specialise The usual. DSL, ethernet connections, voip, etc Most of our income is DSL nah i meant do you not the isp Ahh, yeah. Anything technical ahh yip :) that's basically my role heh Most small companies are the same - everyone does everything shit we don't make shit all off dsl. none of the providers here make much off dsl ethernet, voip etc have more profit Ethernet has bigger profit margins, but you sell it to far fewer people true but like dsl there is so small margins i dunno, like here, you pay a lot to one company who owns dsl equipment that connects to the users etc so that basically eats into things and also bandwidth is expensive here that said all the isp's here have data caps Here it's British Telecom who owns the majority of the copper to peoples houses and DSL DSLAMs etc. We buy end user DSL tails from them yeh, so probably similar deal. i have a friend in the uk in cambridge he was using dsl his dsl was really shit i think it had interleaving on but like he got poor sync speeds. then he moved, and he got slightly better syn cspeeds. speeds but it seems like exchanges are often far away there? like he was at 30 or 40 db attenuation something really high but like here they're doing cabinets everywehre to give people faster sync rates so most people sync at between around 8 to 20 mbit Cambridge is a bit of an anomaly. It has lots of high tech business and a university etc, so has lots of high tech fibre connections. But apart from that, it's a small towm with copper that has been there for 60+ years i sync around 2100/1260 oh so that's why his dsl sucks? I know other people in cambridge, and they all say the same he said that he wouldn't get virgin cable cos they wouldn't stop pestering him when he told them that the person that had cable connected when he moved in has left. and were impossible to deal with but i think virgin did 50mbit cable or something err 2100 i meant 21500 They're rolling out fibre-to-the-cabinet here too. I have it here at home, and get about 20Mb down and 10Mb up vdsl? Yeah. VDSL2 there's vdsl2 equipment here like i'll be on a vdsl2 port but no-one is selling it yet Maximum sync rate is 40M down and 10 up oh and atm in t he trails you have to have interleaving on so it's high ping i used to live in a different city and had like 20 msec higher ping but like the diff between 10 and 30 msec ping is actually quite noticable to me Fibre-to-the-premises is on the roadmap here too. That will give 100M downstream heh thing is web browsing doesn't go anywhere near 100 mbit It's all the streaming video which is the killer not here :) yet. well i suppose there's youtube but like that doesn't do anywhere near 100 mbit We're a UK ISP, and Wimbledon tennis tournament is on this week - lunchtime data usage is sky high on our business customers heh is there a cdn for it? The BBC stream it all live. They use Akamai and Highwinds as the CDN for it which you'll have plenty of capacity to? hmm, highwinds connectivity to nz isn't great if its' the one i think it is Oh yes. gig-e ports to Akamai. Highwinds refused to peer with us as we're too small that's weird? i thought cdn's would have open peering :) The capacity problems come on the DSL backhaul links to BT You'd think so, wouldn't you. Maybe that's why they're losing out to Akamai ;) oh right that's what was happening here then they fixed it well kind of you have to change the way you're doing things to connect akamai is really slow i reckon like with uncached content well here it is at least i honestly though they'd use more smarts Peering is very big in the UK. Over half our traffic goes via peering rather than paid transit wow! about 10% of traffic is peered here? i can't find a highwinds test download We have huge peering LANs that have hundreds of members on them in the UK. I understand it's done differently in other parts of the world, with smaller per-building or per-provider public peering LANs, and lots of direct cables for private peering anyway hwcdn.net goes to LA here like the biggest providers don't peer but the smaller ones do but like there's no google or anything here so like there's not a lot of content peering and like bittorrent etc goes all over the place Well, the big content providers or end-user eyeball networks peer here. But the big transit providers fairly obviously refuse to. but usually not to peers much yeh but like BT wouldn't peer right? and virginmedia wouldn't? and you were saying highwinds don't with small providers Virgin don't, no so it's interesting you can still get 50% peering traffic i suppose youtube accounts for a bit? Yeah, we peer with google and facebook, which account for lots of traffic cool i suppose it is harder here i've been trying to develop a system to improve performance over high latency connections atm With .nz being thousands of miles from anywhere else? err over the internet i mean cos like international web browsing sucks from here i've been like proxying with persistent connections using geo ip lookups to send to close proxies i've kind of figured out that it wroks works I can't see an easy way to fix that, apart from dragging .nz somewhere else, or laying lots more undersea fibre but now i want to try doing tcp acceleration mm, well my proxy system does google's initcwnd thing like with sending more pcakets initially which helps a lot Ahh, window size stuff but also like lots of sites don't have window sizes that get big etc yeah but even being closer to a destination if a site has a small amount of packet loss and you're close resends have to go less distance so as long as you don't have packet loss to a site that's near it if the site near it has a big of packet loss to destination it doesn't hurt nearly as much. but like, i suppose i'm a bit of a geek, i just want to see how fast i can actually get web browsing to get :) which means having good peering etc. but i can't think of any cheap way to do that in my tests i've noticed that you have to be within about 20 msec from destination to get good speeds. but like the internet is a huge place.. you can't really be 20 msec from everywhere like norway is over 20 msec frmo london but how many web sites other than opera are in norway? actually looking at a map, i think norway could be 20 msec from london if there was a direct cable i assume there probably isn't I've got to run mercutio: Nice talking to you.