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August 19, 2014

Sprint screwing their subscribers again

Filed under: Random Thought — Tags: — Nate @ 12:15 pm

As a former Sprint customer for more than a decade I though this was interesting news.

My last post about Sprint was appropriately titled “Can Sprint do anything else to drive me away as a customer“. I left Sprint less because I did not like them/service/etc and really more because I wanted to use the HP Pre 3 which was GSM, which meant AT&T (technically could of used T-Mobile but the Pre 3 didn’t support all of T-mobile’s 3G frequencies which meant degraded service coverage). So I was leaving Sprint regardless but they certainly didn’t say or do anything that made me want to second guess that decision.

Anyway, today Sprint announces a big new fancy family plan that is better than the competition.

Except there is one glaring problem with this plan

[..]you’ll have to sign-up between Aug. 22 and Sept. 30, and current subscribers cannot apply.

Yeah, Sprint loves their customers.

On that note I thought this comment was quite interesting on El Reg:

[..]They combine Verizon-level arrogance with truly breath-taking incompetence into one slimy package. Their network stinks, it’s the slowest of the Big Four (and not by a small margin, either), their customer service makes Comcast look good[..]

 

August 16, 2014

Blog spam stats

Filed under: Random Thought — Nate @ 9:15 am

I just upgraded my Akismet plugin for the first time in a long time and this version gives me all sorts of fun stats about the spam that comes through here (they don’t count my posts as SPAM but maybe they should consider that).

Anyway, the first one was somewhat startling to me, perhaps it shouldn’t be but it was anyway, I had to go back and look when I told wordpress to close comments off on posts older than 90 days (that was done entirely to limit impact of spam see side bar I have a note about re-opening comments if you wish to comment on an older post for a temporary amount of time.

So fortunately my apache logs go back to December 19 2013 as when I did this. Behold the impact!

Impact of disabling comments on posts older than 90 days

Impact of disabling comments on posts older than 90 days

The last 5 months of 2013 generated 97,055 spam, vs the first 8 months(so far) of 2014 has generated 6,360 spam (not even as much as August 2013 alone).

Next up is the all time spam history, which just goes back to 2012, I guess they were not collecting specifics on stats before that I have been a subscriber to this service for longer than that for sure.

TechOpsGuys spam all time

TechOpsGuys spam all time

I’ve never really managed spam here, I rarely look at what is being blocked well there is so much(even now).

August 12, 2014

Some internet routers ran out of memory today

Filed under: Networking — Tags: , , — Nate @ 5:03 pm

(here is a link to in depth analysis on the issue)

Fortunately I didn’t notice any direct impact to anything I personally use. But I first got notification from one of the data center providers we use that they were having network problems they traced it down to memory errors and they frantically started planning for emergency memory upgrades across their facilities. My company does not and has never relied upon this data center for network connectivity so it never impacted us.

A short time later I noticed a new monitoring service that I am using sent out an outage email saying their service providers were having problems early this morning and they had migrated customers away from the affected data center(s).

Then I contacted one of the readers of my blog whom I met a few months ago and told him the story of my data center that is having this issue which sounded similar to a story he told me at the time about his data center provider. He replied with a link to this Reddit article which talks about how the internet routing table exceeded 512,000 routes for the first time today, and that is a hard limit in some older equipment which causes them to either fail, or to perform really slowly as some routes have to be processed in software instead of hardware.

I also came across this article (which I commented on) which mentions similar problems but no reference to BGP or routing tables (outside my comments at the bottom).

[..]as part of a widespread issue impacting major network providers including Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon.

One of my co-workers said he was just poking around and could find no references to what has been going on today other than the aforementioned Reddit article. I too am surprised if so many providers are having issues that this hasn’t made more news.

(UPDATE – here is another article from zdnet)

I looked at the BGP routing capacity of some core switches I had literally a decade ago and they could scale up to 1 million unique routes of BGP4 routes in hardware, and 2 million non unique (not quite sure what the difference is anything beyond static routing has never been my thing). I recall seeing routers again many years ago that could hold probably 10 times that (I think the main distinction between a switch and a router is the CPU and memory capacity ? at least for the bigger boxes with dozens to hundreds of ports?)

So it’s honestly puzzling to me how any service provider could be impacted by this today. How any equipment not capable of handling 512k routes is still in use in 2014 (I can understand for smaller orgs but not service providers). I suppose this also goes to show that there is wide spread lack of monitoring of these sorts of metrics. In the Reddit article there is mention of talks going on for months people knew this was coming — well apparently not everyone obviously.

Someone wasn’t watching the graphs.

I’m planning on writing a blog post on the aforementioned monitoring service I recently started using soon too, I’ve literally spent probably five thousand hours over the past 15 years doing custom monitoring stuff and this thing just makes me want to cry it’s so amazingly powerful and easy to use. In fact just yesterday I had someone email me about a MRTG document I wrote 12 years ago and how it’s still listed on the MRTG site even today (I asked the author to remove the link more than a year ago that was the last time someone asked me about it, that site has been offline for 10 years but is still available in the internet archive).

This post was just a quickie inspired by my co-worker who said he couldn’t find any info on this topic, so hey maybe I’m among the first to write about it.

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