Tuesday, March 15, 2005

GINX V

After many, many months in the pipeline, GINX got its first (second actually, Rhodes was the first) peer — kudos to Bradley for bringing the Albany Schools Network online.

A few teething problems emerged once we started to see real traffic via the GINX switch. The first of these related to some DNS hacks we were doing. Because Albany Schools effectively moved from inside our firewall to outside (history; don't ask ...), we needed to punch some holes into our firewall to get things to work as they were before. This won't be the case when other people come on board.

The second problem was that we had an asymmetric route to Rhodes. We're peering to GINX with our two redundant border routers. A bug in the config of our primary router meant it wasn't advertising its route to GINX but was learning routes from it — so traffic from Rhodes went out via one router and in via a different one. Sorta breaks stateful firewall rules ;-) Adding the missing allow line to the config fixed that problem; GINX now sees two routes for Rhodes and gets the preference (metric, multi-exit discriminator) right. BGP is cool.

To celebrate this, Russell and I had a go at updating the GINX website to do content negotiation à la the W3C's Architecture of the World Wide Web. So now http://ginx.org.za/lookingglass.cgi is http://ginx.org.za/lookingglass, http://ginx.org.za/status.html is http://ginx.org.za/status and so on. We also created an RSS feed and got Sablotron and PHP to render the status page from it via an XSLT style sheet. The web is a wonderful place. CSS, PHP and XML can make it better.

Now we need to get Cliff at Imaginet to get round to setting up his peer — all the bits seem to be in place, he just needs to plug them together — and we'll start seeing some real use from GINX. Oh, and the Foundation would be nice too, but that's a lot more complex to get right because of how it's connected to the peering point and they're about to start SciFest. Broken routing there would probably go down like a lead balloon.

posted by guy at: 22:46 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link