Out with the Trek, in with the Gate

▼ Nine months ago I got myself the entire series of Star Trek Voyager on DVD. Today, I watched the series finale. Usually those suck, but this one was pretty good! It did provide some closure but not at the cost of being an entertaining episode in its own right with plenty of action.

However, I must say that at several episodes a week the weaknesses in Star Trek in general and Voyager in particular became very apparent: a lot of talk, stories tend to be repetitive and are too self-contained. I would love to have seen Voyager with today's long-arch approach to TV. But the biggest issue is that the technology is magic: it's all way too advanced to be based on any real science. So basically anything goes, which makes for uninteresting stories.

I used to think the first couple of seasons were weak and the middle seasons (when the Borg show up) were much stronger. But this time around, the early seasons seemed stronger and the middle ones not really better. The last few seasons still have some good stuff, but there's nothing big in them to look forward to so at some point I started to look forward to the end.

So out the the old, in with the new: I got all ten seasons of Stargate SG1 on DVD, ripped the DVDs and imported everything into iTunes. SG1 is much more grounded in current-day reality, and the notion of traveling between worlds without ships is ingenious. So I'm looking forward to seeing that show again. I believe the first two and the last two seasons are weaker here, but I'll find out soon enough.

Permalink - posted 2015-09-20

20 years of BGP

▼ 20 years ago today, I got my first autonomous system (AS) number, marking my entry in the BGP business. (5399, if you're wondering.)

To quote Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." So let's look back and see what has happened over those 20 years.

Back in 1995, BGP had been around for about six years: BGP versions 1 - 3 were published as RFCs in 1989, 1990 and 1991, respectively. And then in 1994, the BGP-4 spec was published and that's still the version we use today. Crazy, right? I remember when I was writing my BGP book (published by O'Reilly in 2002), my editor asked whether there'd be a new version of BGP soon. I told him not to worry about it.

bART

However, pretty much all other aspects of the internet have changed in those two decades. The first version of the IPv6 specifications wouldn't be published until several months later. I hadn't heard of Network Address Translation (NAT) yet—RFC 1918 hadn't even been published! So we had to use RFC 1597 to get our private addresses. But IPv4 addresses were plentiful those days, so why would we? DHCP had been out for a couple of years, but I'm pretty sure I hadn't used it by then: stuff either was configured manually, or through PPP.

Yes, those were the days of screeching modems. AS5399 was the AS number for bART Internet Services, a small ISP in The Hague. When I first got in touch with bART they had a 28 kbps link to one ISP and a 128 kbps link to another. But all the traffic flowed over the slow line. I rerouted most of it over the faster line, which landed me a job. But obviously being able to use both lines together would be even better, but to do that right, you need BGP to do proper "multihoming".

One of the perks of working at an ISP was that I was able to get my own leased line. Back in those days, you could lease a regular copper phone wire between two locations, and this was relatively cheap (55 guilders (25 euros) a month, IIRC) if both locations were served by the same telephone exchange. As one third of The Hague is connected to the really, really huge exchange in the Marnixstraat, that applied to me. However, my leased line was only 28k, so around that same time I got my ISDN line (which I would keep until 2007), which was much faster at 64 kbps, or even 128 kbps if you bundled both channels. But remember, those channels were metered so that could get expensive, even for local calls. Today, I have a 120 Mbps cable connection at home, which is a thousand times faster. That makes for a bandwidth increase of about 41% per year. I remember signing a contract for 2 Mbps internet service for 30,000 guilders (13,000 euros) per month a year later. So the wholesale price of bandwidth has also gone down by about a factor 1000 in 20 years.

Size of the BGP table

We initially ran BGP on a Cisco 2501 router , maxed out with16 MB RAM. Back then, the BGP table was around 30,000 prefixes, which just about fit in that 16 MB. I don't remember what kind of router we switched to as the table size outgrew that 16 MB. Today, there are about 560,000 IPv4 prefixes in the BGP table, so roughly a factor 20 increase in 20 years, or about 16% per year.

Back in 2006, the Internet Architecture Board held a "routing and addressing" workshop in Amsterdam, where the issue of the growth of the BGP table was discussed. For a long time, this was considered a serious problem. We even came up with Shim6 in the IETF to allow for multihoming without using BGP with IPv6, but that never went anywhere as people just used BGP to multihome with IPv6. So, 16% annual growth of the BGP table is inconvenient, but apparently not as inconvenient as the alternatives. (Of course, if you run BGP to multihome, that solves your problem immediately while increasing the BGP table for everyone. Waiting for the whole world to adopt Shim6 so you can multihome without BGP doesn't provide that instant gratification even though it keeps the routing table small and thus the routers cheap(er).)

BGP's evolution

I still have a Cisco 2503 (that's the model with an ISDN port) lying around. I think we used IOS 10.3 or so back in 1995. If I load that IOS version on the 2503, I'm pretty sure that 2503 with the 20-year-old software could still talk BGP with a current router. (Well, until that 16 MB RAM is full.) However, that is not to say that nothing has changed in intermediate decades. A whole bunch of capabilities were added over the years, including:

• communities, for tagging routes with additional information
• flap damping, to keep unstable prefixes from being propagated
• the TCP MD5 option to protect BGP sessions against spoofed packets
• multiprotocol extensions, to support IPv6, multicast, VPNs and more
• route refresh, to allow sessions to be reset non-destructively
• the 32-bit AS number capability
• and in the not-too-distant future: BGPsec, which will make BGP more secure

The creators of BGP-4 did a great job with the extension mechanism, allowing the protocol to be extended as needed with very few backward compatibility issues. So future network protocol creators, take heed. And as a result, we'll probably be running BGP-4 forever, although it's hard to say what will be bolted onto it in the future.

BGP and me

Over the past 20 years, I have configured BGP for dozens of clients on about a dozen different types of routers, I wrote a book about BGP, started bgpexpert.com, wrote a master's thesis on a crazy way to do multipath in BGP and proposed an improvement to the protocol. Since my book came out, I've been doing BGP training courses, having trained at least 200, but probably more than 300 people. And I'm sure BGP and me haven't seen the last of each other. But right now, I have a movie to watch, candles to blow out and pie to eat!

Permalink - posted 2015-08-15

The music problem

▼ After reading stuff like this and even like this, I'm so glad I didn't sign up for Apple's new music service.

I regularly hear about people with more than 25000 songs in their iTunes library. Compared to them, my music library is tiny at only 3500 songs. Still, that's more than 9 days worth of music, or about 200 CDs or 300 LPs. (It's insane that these days this will fit on an SD card the size of a postage stamp.) So there's an entire universe of music out there for me to discover. But it turns out that, not unexpectedly, my prime music discovery days seem to be behind me. These are the numbers of songs per decade in my music library:

• 1900 - 1909: 1
• 1920 - 1929: 1
• 1940 - 1949: 4
• 1950 - 1959: 102
• 1960 - 1969: 421
• 1970 - 1979: 766
• 1980 - 1989: 897
• 1990 - 1999: 526
• 2000 - 2009: 379
• 2010 - 2015: 8

(And the 2000 - 2009 number is inflated quite a bit because a lot of purchased music has the year field set to the year of (re-) issue rather than the year of original recording.)

Still, after the whole Taylor Swift thing, I considered doing the three month trial for Apple Music. Until I realized that if I did that, my local music library would become intermingled with music from the cloud, with too many corner cases to have any hope that Apple will handle all of them correctly.

I'm not even particularly happy with buying songs from the iTunes Store. Despite the 30 second preview (it's often longer now), I managed to buy the wrong version of a number of songs. I also somehow managed to buy songs that I end up never listening to. Then remember all the issues people have had with iTunes Match. And Apple Music is much more complex than what came before. So I'm not at all surprised that people are having problems combing existing music libraries with Apple Music.

For a while, I've been hoping that Apple's opening up of various aspects of iOS would lead to a more liberal approach to music on iOS devices, rather than the current system where there is only one way to get your (local) music on a device in a workable way: through iTunes. But now that Apple has redoubled its music efforts, that probably isn't going to happen any time soon. Too bad.

Many people have called for breaking up iTunes (on the Mac) into smaller applications that handle more limited tasks better. I can see the appeal: an Apple Music app would be much simpler than bolting on yet another function to iTunes. However, previous experience has shown that any change to iTunes only serves to make it worse. (I'm still on iTunes 12.1, and I'm not sure I'm going to upgrade to 12.2.) Some kind of super ambitious, super radical rethinking of the whole system is certainly going to make some parts of it a lot worse. Remember Final Cut X and iWork '13?

A better approach would be to freeze iTunes as it is today (well, as it was a few years ago, really) and then create new apps for new stuff such as Apple Music. This way, both the people who like the old stuff and people who like the new stuff get something that works well for them. That still doesn't solve the use case of having both the old and the new stuff side-by-side, but then, the current approach doesn't really solve that either.

Permalink - posted 2015-07-30

5 minutes of BGP instability after leap second

▼ This July 30th, at 23:59:60, a leap second was added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Dyn Research posted the following graph on Twitter that shows there was significant BGP update instability for five minutes after the leap second occurred:

Unfortunately, it's not clear why this happened. However, leap seconds have triggered all kinds of mishaps in the past. They're basically miniature Y2K problems. Time and time again, software engineers show that they can't be trusted to take corner cases into account properly.

This does remind me of a situation about a decade ago, where I had a customer that experienced BGP instability every night at the same time. They used Quagga running on Linux machines. We couldn't figure out what the problem was, until we realized that at that very moment, the ntpdate command was run from the cron. ntpdate synchronizes the system clock with an NTP server. As the machine in question had a very poor system clock, this meant that the system's time was adjusted a lot every night, I think a minute or more, but definitely more than 30 seconds.

Which meant that if Quagga had gotten a BGP keepalive message 8 seconds earlier, it now thought that was 38 seconds ago. If BGP is configured with a hold time of 30 seconds, this means that Quagga now thinks the other side has been quiet for longer than the hold time and it'll tear down the BGP session. This is what happened every night for a bunch of BGP sessions. We solved this by running the NTP daemon continuously, so there was never a big adjustment in system time. (Alternatively, just letting the time drift would also have worked.)

The minimum BGP hold time is 3 seconds, so adjusting for an (improperly handled) leap second shouldn't be able to make BGP think the hold time for a session is expired. However, there could be bug somewhere else that impacted BGP.

I'm not sure whether these kinds of issues are a good argument in favor of abandoning leap seconds, as the bugs won't go away, they'll just show up at a less predictable time. But I don't like the current leap second practice, as they're unpredictable, and you can't calculate the time difference in seconds between two dates without taking the entire list of leap seconds into account. I think it would be better to save the leap seconds up and apply them all at the end of a century.

Permalink - posted 2015-07-06