April 2007 Archives

These are the signs of the apocalypse: A worldwide earthquake, the sun ceasing to emit visible light, cats and dogs living together in harmony, and Cogent (AS174) depeering another AS. At least one of these happened earlier this week.

At about 10:00 UTC on Tuesday (6am EDT), Cogent depeered a couple of smaller, UK-based ISPs without notice. This was apparently intentional and due to a review of existing peers and whether they meet peering policies. Does this mean that Cogent is becoming more like its larger competitors that it so enjoys taunting? I'll take a look at who was depeered and speculate on why.

This is the first in a two-part post about what happened to Cogent on Tuesday, April 24, 2007. Later that day, Cogent suffered what appeared to be a fairly widespread serious routing problem. Looking at that in a bit more detail will be a subject for part 2.

I've written about IPv6 in the past—mostly to point out how little traction it has been getting and how unlikely it has become that IPv6 will be the next network layer protocol. A new project hopes to change all that. A hint of how they intend to accomplish this is available by noting that the same content can be found at http://www.ipv6porn.com/. The project describes it as follows:

We're taking 10 gigabytes of the most popular "adult entertainment" videos from one of the largest subscription websites on the Internet, and giving away access to anyone who can connect to it via IPv6. No advertising, no subscriptions, no registration. If you access the site via IPv4, you get a primer on IPv6, instructions on how to set up IPv6 through your ISP, a list of ISPs that support IPv6 natively, and a discussion forum to share tips and troubleshooting. If you access the site via IPv6 you get instant access to "the goods".

The founders of the project acknowledge one key IPv6 adoption barrier: the lack of content. There's a chicken-and-egg cycle between content and users. Users want content to consume, but content wants users to consume it. As long as their is neither (in any numbers worth talking about) on any IPv6 network, there's no reason for either users or content providers to migrate there. IPv6 is a network-equivalent of the Bridge to Nowhere (another doozy from Alaska Senator Ted "The Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens). It's expensive, goes nowhere and no one needs to use it. This project is an attempt to fix that.

But there are two big things missing from IPv6, and content is only one of them.