Next Monday June 8, 2020, 8 years and 2 days after World IPv6 Launch, the RIPE NCC is organizing a RIPE NCC::Educa online education event about running IPv6-only.
Halfway through the morning (European time) I'll be talking about IPv6 address planning, based on my experiences with IPv6 numbering plans (see my publications).
At the end of the event, I'll be participating in a panel discussion with Nico Schottelius and Veronica McKillop titled "When can we turn off IPv4?"
Go to the RIPE website for more information and to sign up.
Turns out when it comes to IPv6 adoption, it is Christmas every day now:
Google's IPv6 statistics show that during the week, IPv6 adoption is about 5% lower than during the weekends, as apparently, more people have IPv6 at home than at work. Around Christmas, the minimum goes up while the maximum stays about the same.
In this regard the COVID-19 lockdown means it's Christmas every day: between December 20 and January 5, IPv6 adoption didn't drop below 27%. Between January 6 and March 13 there was no work day IPv6 adoption reached 28%, but since March 23, work day IPv6 adoption never dipped below 28%.
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Recently, Cloudflare launched Is BGP safe yet?. And they immediately answer their own question: No.
What they're getting at is RPKI deployment. RPKI is a mechanism that lets the owner of a block of IP addresses specify which network gets to use those addresses. (Which AS gets to originate a prefix, in BGP speak.) RPKI protects to some forms of (mostly accidental) address hijacking. But for RPKI to work, the address owner needs to publish a "route origination authorization" (ROA) and networks around the globe need to filter based on these ROAs.
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Recently, Cloudflare launched Is BGP safe yet?. And they immediately answer their own question: No.
What they're getting at is RPKI deployment. RPKI is a mechanism that lets the owner of a block of IP addresses specify which network gets to use those addresses. (Which AS gets to originate a prefix, in BGP speak.) RPKI protects to some forms of (mostly accidental) address hijacking. But for RPKI to work, the address owner needs to publish a "route origination authorization" (ROA) and networks around the globe need to filter based on these ROAs.
So globally, for just about 20% of all prefixes (address blocks) RPKI checks out (valid). For a little less than a percent, the way the address block is routed is not in agreement with the ROA (invalid). For the remaining nearly 80% of prefixes, no ROA is published (not-found). However, these numbers are different in various parts of the world:
North America: 9% valid, 0.3% invalid, 91% not-found
These numbers show how many address owners are publishing ROAs. This is very easy to do. Here in the RIPE region, it's just a few clicks in the LIR portal. The harder part is filtering based on RPKI. For this you need validator software, for which there are now several choices, and then you need to hook up the validator to your routers, explained here for Cisco and here for Juniper.
For some time, I feared networks would hesitate to filter out prefixes with the RPKI state "invalid", because there's still several thousand prefixes that are invalid. However, it now looks like there are enough big networks doing this that the onus of working around the resulting breakage is correctly put on the address owners / networks that cause the "invalid" state rather than the networks doing the filtering.
Is BGP safe yet? as well as a RIPE labs RPKI test tell you if your ISP is filtering RPKI invalid prefixes, with Cloudflare also naming and shaming the big ones that don't.
The RPKI Observatory has a list of prefixes that have the RPKI invalid state and are therefore unreachable with RPKI filtering enabled. The Route Views collector now also has RPKI, letting you check the state of individual prefixes (telnet route-views.oregon-ix.net). Or use the NLNOG RING looking glass.
Two weeks ago, I ordered a Mac Mini, my first desktop computer in 20 years. This is sort of a review of the Mac Mini, but I reserve the right to digress.
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Back in 2013, I wrote a blog post about archiving. In it, I compared the costs per terabyte (and the weight per terabyte) of several ways to store data for archival purposes. When I read Beyond Time Machine: 5 Archiving over at The Eclectic Light Company blog, I realized that it’s time revisit this topic.
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Back in 2013, I wrote a blog post about archiving. In it, I compared the costs per terabyte (and the weight per terabyte) of several ways to store data for archival purposes. When I read Beyond Time Machine: 5 Archiving over at The Eclectic Light Company blog, I realized that it’s time revisit this topic. This is the list of storage options with the price per gigabyte in euros, back in 2013 and now in 2020:
€/TB 2013
€/TB 2020
Sweet spot
DVD±R
45
67
BR-R
45
2.5" USB HDD
60
23
4 - 10 TB
3.5" internal HDD
35
32
4 - 8 TB
USB flash
370
195
128 - 256 GB
SD card
520
320
128 GB
Internal SSD
125
1 TB
USB SSD
170
1 TB
And just to see how ridiculous things can get, if you buy an Apple computer, SSD upgrades can cost as much as € 1000 per terabyte (€ 250 to go from 256 to 512 GB).
The sweet spot is the size where the cost per terabyte is the lowest. If you go smaller or larger, you pay more for the same amount of storage. I got the 2020 prices by looking at bol.com. Obviously, prices vary, sometimes significantly. I chose the lowest prices, except if only a couple of no-brand options were the cheapest. Note that inflation was around 7% between 2013 and 2020.
What’s interesting here:
DVD±Rs have gone up in price
Blu-ray recordable is now at about the per-TB price DVD±R used to be
3.5" HDDs haven’t really gone down in price per TB
2.5" USB HDDs are now about three times cheaper than they used to be
2.5" USB HDDs are now a good deal cheaper than 3.5" HDDs
SSDs are still much more expensive than HDDs
2.5" USB HDDs are by far the cheapest way to archive your data. They’re also convenient: they’re small in size, and unlike 3.5" USB HDDs (which are extinct now, I think) they are bus powered so no issues with power supplies. Yes, copying terabytes worth of data to a USB HDD takes a lot of time. But you can do that overnight. With BD-Rs you need to put in a new one for every 25 to 100 GB.
I can still read most (but not all!) of the DVDs I burned 15 years ago without trouble, but I wouldn’t bet any money that a 15-year-old USB HDD will still work. You really have to keep your archived data on at least two of those and then replace them every three years or so, copying your data from the old one to a new one. (Or, more likely in my case: from my NAS to a new HDD.) But that’s a lot more doable than duplicating BD-Rs. Also, any computer can read USB HDDs, while for DVDs and blu-rays you need a drive, and those are much less common than they used to be, and that trend is sure to continue.
