November 2007 Archives

As part of upgrading our network we are changing access to our primary
name servers (217.114.173.6 and 82.96.97.64) so that they are authoritative only. If you have servers on our network that are set to use these, then you will need to update the DNS settings.

We have attempted to notify all customers whose servers are currently using our authoritative name servers. However, if you have not been contacted and believe your server(s) may be using them, then you can contact us directly for more information. Any customers who put in a server within the last six months should be already using the new servers.

On Friday the 7th of December, the servers will be made authoritative only. If your name servers are not updated by then this may cause issues with connectivity.

As I've mentioned a few times in the past few weeks and months, we're in the process of switching over from blacknight.ie to blacknight.com.

I switched this blog over to the .com a couple of weeks ago and didn't think anymore about it until just now.

Normally I check the comment spam filter every couple of days to see if any legitimate comments have been blocked and end up dumping several thousand junk comments.

For the last few days it's been completely empty!

I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but I suspect that the spammers are confused by the redirects or something... I guess they'll find the new location for the comment form fairly soon, but if they don't I won't complain!

Of course I might have just broken the blog comments ... If you can't post a comment please let me know (michele@blacknight.com)!

The Irish PHP Users Group meets every month in 3 different locations.

This month is no different with 3 meetings scheduled for tomorrow evening:

Dublin: Longstone pub on Townsend Street
Cork: Metropole Hotel on MacCurtain Street
Monaghan: Contact Kae Verens for details.

More information on the UserGroup may be found on their site

On a sidenote, if anyone has an event that might be of interest to our clients please let me know. I'm only too happy to plug relevant events on the company blog

If you're reading this in a web browser instead of an RSS reader you should notice that it's look and feel has changed quite a bit.

We're currently rolling out our new design and look.. Over the next few days we'll be upgrading all the public facing sections of our sites etc., to give you a new uniform look and feel...

Hopefully you all like green and black - it's purely coincidence that Green & Black are my favourite chocolates as well!

Anyhow we've updated the blog (that's here!) and the forum so far and the support area is next on the list

Thanks to the guys in Spoiltchild for the design and 2BScene for the implementation work

Our support area has been upgraded to the latest version of Kayako, which is the software we use to run it.

We'll be tweaking the settings, and customising the look and feel over the coming days, so don't be put off if it looks a bit different!

A few things may not have been transferred over during the upgrade, but they will be restored to all their glory over the coming days.. It will also give you a chance to get a first look at the new style design that we will be unveiling shortly. We hope you like it!

The maintenance window for Cold Fusion has been cancelled

Our technical team found a resolution that did not require any upgrades

Customer Migrations:

Due to restraints on colo space in the Dublin area at the moment we've had to make provisions to allow us to grow for the next 12 months at a minimum.

With this in mind, we've contracted with InterXion Ireland to get our own cage in their Dublin faciltiy in Parkwest Business Park.

On Sunday 2nd of December 2007 we wish to move our existing racks from the shared floor in InterXion to our caged area. Customers affected will be a small subset of our old and new shared hosting on the following two servers and their associated IP addresses:

balin
81.17.252.15
81.17.252.16
81.17.252.17
81.17.252.18
81.17.252.19
81.17.252.20
ragnell
81.17.252.110
81.17.252.111
81.17.252.112
81.17.252.113
81.17.252.114
81.17.252.115
81.17.252.116
81.17.252.117
81.17.252.118
81.17.252.119
81.17.252.120
81.17.252.121
81.17.252.122
81.17.252.123
81.17.252.124
81.17.252.125
81.17.252.126
81.17.252.127
81.17.252.128

Starting at 21:00 hours on Sunday 2nd of December, we'll be powering down the racks that contain these servers and transporting them down the corridor to our new Caged area. We estimate around 2-4 hours of downtime for the complete migration. This estimate is worst case scenario.

Colo and dedicated customers located in InterXion will be contacted separately with more information regarding their hardware.

As with any move of this magnitude we wish for anyone with any thoughts or questions regarding this please contact us ASAP so we can consider their ideas or issues prior to the move.

Contact details:

+353599183072
support [at] blacknight.ie

Blacknight Operations

What: Coldfusion JDBC Drivers
When: Friday, 21st November, between 10:00AM and 10:15AM

What Will Be Affected:

Coldfusion websites on the Bediver server will be shutdown down while the JDBC drivers are upgraded.

When: 21st Nov 2007 @ 22:00

We require a 2 hour maintenance window to replace a switch we think may be faulty (after the outage at 8:40am on 20th of November 2007).

We'll rack and config the switch and hope to start moving customers at 22:00 hours. We expect around 2-5 minutes per customer for the change over. However just to be safe, we'd like to use a 2 hour maintenance window.

Summary:

Starting at 22:00 hours on November 21st we'll be replacing a switch in a customer rack on the first floor.

A further notice to the affected customers will be sent out via e-mail.

What: Blacknight Support

When: Thursday, 22nd November, between 18:00 and 21:00

What Will Be Affected:

Online support via the support website and email will be down for the duration of the upgrade. All email to Blacknight staff and other Blacknight addresses will be delayed.

Kayako, the system we use for support, has had extra features added which should allow for greater integration into our other systems. It is a major upgrade, which requires a lot of the database to be rebuilt and our email to be queued.

Phone support will still be available to CoLo and Dedicated customers at the out of hours number.

Summary:

All customers will be affected.

Summary

At 08:40:03.514 am this morning access switch 15 in a customer cabinet on the first floor detected a loopback on both of its GigE connections and both switch ports were set to err-disable. Our syslog servers never got this information so we assumed the switch had physically failed.

Time Line:

08:40 alerts received by on-call engineer, engineer proceeded to trouble shoot the issue
08:50 issue was perceived to be a switch failure, DEG notified to reboot the switch and to cable test both cables connecting the switch to the core network.
09:15 DEG call back saying that the issue doesn't appear to be related to cabling as they had ran the fluke test on both uplink cables.
09:16 DEG report both ge0/1 and ge0/2 are showing state down, both syslog servers checked for possible data that may explain this. Nothing found.
09:20 Blacknight ask DEG to connect another port on access switch 15 to our core network. DEG have to make up a cable.
09:35:02 Fa0/19 comes up (without config)
09:42 Config placed on Fa0/19 to carry trunk traffic to core network, network comes up 30 seconds later
09:43 Network in customer cab resumes and all machines come back online.

Provisions:

We're going to investigate this issue as this is not normal behavior and neither of the core access switches report any issues with loopbacks.

We'll swap out this switch incase there is a fault with it today.

Total downtime for this customer cab was 1 hour and 3 minutes.

We have been informed by INEX, the Irish Neutral Exchange, that they will be conducting maintenance on 28th November between midnight and two am Irish time.

If you're going to focus all your energies and money on developing your online presence then there are some really simple things that you need to get right.

If you were to rent a small shop in the centre of any town or city you would have to pay "top dollar", but if your main activity is centred around your website you don't need to worry about that particular expense.

However you do need to make some small investment in your actual online brand, as it's far too easy for someone else to grab it if you're not careful.

I'm always amazed at how little attention companies pay to basic online brand protection and, speaking from personal experience, it's an expensive lesson to learn after the fact!

When I first setup Blacknight I made a number of rather silly mistakes with our online branding. I didn't check that all the domains were available to register - hindsight's a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Acquiring domains when they've already been registered by someone else can be awkward if not impossible. And even if it's not awkward it can be expensive.

If you're going to start from scratch then you need to check if the name you've chosen fits some basic criteria:

• Is it short?


• Is it memorable?


• Can people spell it easily?

How many times have you heard an advert on the radio for some "cool" product or service and then not been able to find the company's website?

It's happened to me far too often. In some cases it's because the company name is odd and forgettable.
In other cases it's not clear how the domain name is spelt.

When it comes to registering the domain names a bit of common sense goes a long way. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to register a couple of extra domain names NOW than get into litigation about them later.

How much does a legal letter cost?
How much does a WIPO dispute cost?

If you compare those costs against the costs of registering a couple of extra domain names it's obvious which option to go for.

If you're an EU company I'd strongly urge you to get the following extensions:
com,net,org,info,biz,eu and co.uk
If your company is based in Ireland, then getting the .ie domain won't hurt!

Of course if you need to expand your brand into other markets in the EU then you probably need to get a few more extensions, but if you get the ones I mentioned now you'll save yourself a lot of headaches and MONEY !!

I mentioned the upcoming eNum event a couple of weeks ago.

I've just received details from them about the day's event and it sounds like it could be very interesting:
Venue: Gresham Hotel, O'Connell St, Dublin 1
Date: Wednesday 28th November 2007
Time: 4.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. (followed by drinks and snacks)

here will be no charge to attend the information session.
(parking available; close to DART and LUAS)

Agenda:

* Welcome and Introduction (IENUM)
* ENUM in Ireland (IENUM)
* ENUM in Austria (IPA)
* ENUM in the UK (BT)
* How to become an ENUM registrar (IENUM)
* ENUM - an Irish implementation (Soft Telecom)
* ENUM – an industry-led policy perspective (ENUM Policy Advisory Board)
* Open forum - Q&A
Objectives of the session:

• Share the experiences of ENUM in Europe, and understand the various business models used by registrars
• Inform about the benefits to service providers of being an ENUM tier 2 registrar
• Show how to become an ENUM registrar
• Discuss technical implementation details of ENUM and VoIP
• Share experience of a practical business implementation in Ireland -
ENUM as a tool to connect remote sites

If your feed reader went a little nuts last night and grabbed a load of old posts from here there is a simple explanation!

I changed this site over to the .com domain last night as part of our rebranding. This would force a lot of RSS readers to pull down fresh copies of a lot of content - sorry about that - I've no intention of changing the domain again for quite some time!

We've always been one of the first companies to peer with new members of the INEX. Last week Nick Hilliard from INEX announced to the peering community that Amazon were connected and ready to start peering with other members.

Today we've added Amazon Europe on LAN#1 on the INEX. All Amazon services that are hosted in Europe will be available over this peering session. We've also heard that other services like S3 etc will be hosted in Europe shortly (read that as 6-12 months or maybe sooner) and as above will be available to us and our customers.

Please be aware that these services are not available on any other Peering platform in Europe, the INEX is the first exchange in Europe that Amazon have connected to so as a hosting provider we have unique, low latency, high bandwidth capacity access to Amazons web services.

update:

I hear that Euro S3 is available already! So we're directly connected with the network that S3 is served from. This is very good news for our colo and dedicated customers that are using S3!

If you're in the Galway region then you might be interested in the Linux InstallFest on Saturday 17th November:

Galway LUG is organising a multi-distro installfest from 1000-1200 on Saturday 17th of November, in the DERI building (opposite the Westwood Hotel), Newcastle Road, Galway[1]. We will have people available to help with Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva and RedHat (minimum). There will be demo systems with various software preinstalled, and with luck plenty of install CD/DVDs.

In typical Irish fashion both the IIA Net Visionary Awards and the Golden Spiders are on this month.

This has happened every year for the past three years (possibly longer). You'd think that they'd spread themselves out more .....

Several of our clients and friends have made the shortlist in both awards this year, so we wish them the best of luck!

The Golden Spiders are allowing the public to vote on the best blog and social networking categories this year, so if you haven't voted you may want to do so now.

We aren't shortlisted in either (we didn't enter the GS, so getting shortlisted would have been a miracle!) this year, so we won't be attending the ceremonies, but from previous years' experience I know it's good fun!

If you are sending us documentation for your personal IE domain(s) could you please ensure that it is legible.

If you are using a photocopy or fax make sure that it is "light", as we are getting a lot of very "interesting" faxes that are completely illegible.

The best option would be to email us a scanned jpeg!

Carrying the title and theme "Mobile Broadband - Mobile Content, The Next Wave" the 2007 Wireless Ireland Conference is being held on November 13th 2007 in Dublin's Irish Management Institute

The lineup of speakers for this year's conference includes a healthy mix of Irish and international players:

John Strand, CEO, http://www.strandconsult.dk (Strand Consult)
Jan Hoffman, Mobile Manager, http://www.tv2.dk (TV2 Denmark)
Eamon Hession, CEO, http://www.puca.com (Puca)
Emer Conlon, IT Project Manager - http://www.rte.ie (RTE)
Fran Rooney, Chairman, http://www.icebroadband.ie (ICE Broadband)
Mark White, CEO, http://www.nowcasting.ie (Nowcasting)
Richard Rodger, CTO, http://www.feedhenry.com (FeedHenry)
Colm Piercy, CEO, http://www.Digiweb.ie (Digiweb)
Colm Healy, CEO, http://www.xiam.com (Xiam)

As you may have noticed there are now not one but two of us posting to the Blacknight blog.

Paul started posting to our official blog yesterday and we may be adding a couple of more of our staff to it over the coming weeks.

If there are any topics you'd like us to cover please let us know!

Michele

IENUM Ltd, which runs Enum in Ireland, is organising a "user day" at the end of this month.

Although we don't have the details as yet I thought I'd give people plenty of advance warning.

Enum is one of those technologies that *might* become important in the next couple of years, though it might not.

What is it?

ENUM stands for Electronic NUmber Mapping. A protocol developed by the IETF and detailed in RFC 3761 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3761.txt), ENUM provides a means to map telephone numbers to domain names enabling the identification of a variety of services such as VoIP, fax and email available at that telephone number. ENUM is being heralded as the means to interconnect the PSTN and Internet worlds.

Ireland's Enum trials were carried out last year and were deemed successful. Commercial service commenced earlier this year.

For more information please visit the Irish Enum site.

(Disclosure: I sit on the Enum 353 Policy Advisory Board)

Ok not all of it, but the bit that we currently run. But we want to get as many
websites on our IPv6 platform before the end of 2008. This announcement/invitation is to all of our customers and potential customers.

Our plan:

1) To get 90% of our customer base onto IPv6 before the end of 2008.
2) We want to increase awareness of IPv6 in Ireland by advocating it and making every
single website we host for our customers available on the IPv6 Internet.
3) We want to take the lead in Ireland for IPv6 usage and set new standards for the
entire country and possibly the world.

So how are we going to do it? Good question and it's a simple one. We're going to start with the easier customers and then work our way upto the harder customers. So who, out of our customer base, is going to be easy to migrate?

The short answer, anyone that has their own dedicated or colocated server. Or to be more exact anyone running Apache 2.x on Linux. However we're not going to shy away from IIS 6 (despite it's rubbish support of IPv6). So there you have it, anyone with their own machine that runs linux or windows and has IIS 6+ or Apache 2.x or better can avail of this invitation.

Why?

1) Ok this is the difficult part. There are a lot of reasons, however it's going to come down to money eventually. All of our customers and indeed the global Internet community are used to getting IP addresses for free. What if, in 2010 you had to pay 100 euro a month for 1 IPv4 IP address?

Why the heck would I pay for 1 IP address?? Well your broadband line at home has 1 IP address, your SSL enabled website has 1 IP address and your Office has a /29 range from your ISP. That's 10 IP addresses total. Wow 1000 Euro per month. Now throw in your dedicated server into that bill. We give you 20 IP addresses for it and we have to charge 100 euro an IP address. That's another 2000 Euro. So we're upto 3000 Euro a month and all You get is a few IP addresses. _This_ could infact be the case in 2010 or 2011 if we don't hurry up and get dual-stacked and make IPv6 a reality.

2) There are many technical reasons for switching to IPv6 as well. The main ones that we're considering are very real world reasons. Why would an ISP in todays IPv4 Internet bother with IPv6? Why would they upgrade their kit, get a /32 from RIPE or ARIN or which ever RIR region they are in and go to the bother of learning how to deploy this seemingly cumbersome IP number scheme when there is no IPv6 enabled content on the Internet that their customer base (their bread and butter) can see/interact with.

People are not seeing the depletion of the IPv4 pool as a problem. It's been said for the last 3-4 years "In 4 years time we're going to run out and the Internet will die." While this isn't what'll happen, the problem is that we don't really know what will happen. Some people are saying there'll be an "IP aftermarket" similar to the "Domain aftermarket" where you can buy and sell IP resources for large sums of Money. This could potentially create a market where my exotic pricing scheme (outlined above) could exist.

To summarise, Blacknight as Ireland's fastest growing HSP (Hosting Service Provider) are going to lead the Irish Internet into the future by enabling 30k Irish websites to be reached over IPv6 by the end of 2008. Whether this is achievable or not is largely going to be down to our customers. If you have any interest in what we've said above please contact us via e-mail ipv6-wg@blacknight.ie . We want to enable all our customers to use IPv6, it won't be easy for everyone. Shoving your head into the sand waiting for this to all blow over isn't going to work either. One way or another, IPv6 is going to come into play. Live life on the edge, with us, deploy it with us ASAP.

When: Monday 12th of November @ 22:00

What: Migration of CAR's and Firewalls into a single vlan

We're moving the Customer Access Routers and firewalls into a single
vlan so as traffic exchanged between the firewalled and unfirewalled
network segments doesn't need to go into the distribution layer
of our network and hence is switched and not routed. This will
make these sections of our network more efficient and more reliable.
For people who care about network hops, it'll take an extra hop out
of traceroutes between some our network segments.

Who will be affected:

Customers on our unfirewalled network (who have their own routers or
firewalls) will notice a momentary blip while OSPF reconverges. IPv6
for the same customers will see a slight blip of around 2-3 minutes
while we move some things around.

We estimate that there could be 2 - 3 30 second blips to IPv4 traffic
during this window and 3 - 10 minutes of IPv6 downtime.

Summary:

Colocated and Dedicated customers with their own firewalls and routers
and those who are not behind our own dedicated High Availabiltiy firewall
solution will be affected by this maintenance window.

Blacknight Engineering / support@blacknight.com

The recent introduction of "personal IE domains" has been welcomed by all parties, but I get the impression that a lot of people are still unhappy with the restrictive policies being used by the IEDR.

What would people like to see?

Should we have a more open policy?

Should it be a "free for all"?

Are there advantages to a "managed name space"?

Are there disadvantages?

At the moment there aren't that many issues with cybersquatting, spam or phishing in the IE namespace. There are issues - yes. But the barriers that exist at present render dotIE to be too awkward to be of interest to the average online criminal.

One possible solution would be to introduce a couple of subdomains such as co.ie or me.ie etc., that might help with the rules and policies.

Of course the main issue at present is that there is no formal policy development process.

We've decided to extend the special offer on EU domains for the month of November.

You can register a .eu domain for a mere 5 euro!

Check out which dotEU domains are available by using our online search

I just got back from the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, California.

As happens with those kind of events you spend about a week soaking up information. There are a lot of people in the internet industry globally and some of them are doing very interesting and exciting things. I'll be posting about some of those in the coming weeks.

Of course, like any industry, the internet is not without its problems. One of the areas that I've touched on previously is registrant rights and you can expect to hear more about it in the future as ICANN tries to put in place mechanisms to help better protect end users.

All in all it was a fascinating and fruitful week and I am looking forward to the next one!

I'm currently attending the 30th International ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, California.

This morning we have been sitting through the final meeting of the outgoing board and the handover to the new one

Peter Dengate Thrush has been chosen to fill the position vacated by Vint Cerf.

Today also marks the addition of Dr Dennis Jennings to the board.