So, a little before 8:50 this morning, all my connections hung. Fire up mtr, and it doesn’t reach the first hop. I pick up the phone, and there’s no dial tone! I futz around for a while, but by 9:00 there’s still no phone service. I go outside and down the ¼ block to the AT&T switchbox, and there’s an AT&T truck there and a tech messing around with it. I ask him if he’s fixing the outage, and he says no, he’s measuring the noise on the wires. I say I lost my service 10 min. ago, and after getting my phone number he confirms that he pulled my wires along with a bunch of others then. With me standing around, he measures my line next and reconnects it.

WTF? How is it that this is a company which is synonymous with reliability in its reputation? A deliberate, unannounced outage, not during off-peak, and for much longer than need be just because it’s easier to pull all the wires, measure, then reattach than to do them one by one? And I was very lucky this time — last time I lost my phone it took them two days to send a tech out to confirm that the last tech to mess with the switchbox had screwed up my wiring and fix it.

                                       Packets               Pings
 Host                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. 208.127.185.1                     0.0%   801    7.1   7.0   6.0  26.6   1.0
 2. LAX1.CR1.Gig6-0.dslextreme.com   64.1%   801   10.6   8.3   6.2  48.0   3.6

(The situation this morning from ~8 to ~11 o’clock.) TCP canna handle the strain, captain!

I set up IPv6 through 6to4, and found it to be surprisingly easy and simple — subject to the major proviso that you only want IPv6 on one box. This should be easy, 6to4 gives you every address from 2002:abc:123:0:0:0:0:0 to 2002:abc:123:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff to play with. To get it on other boxes, you need to have the end of the 6to4 tunnel route IPv6 packets, and the end-hosts have to get IPv6 addresses from it. Which turns out to be a problem. It’s easy to give your router 2002:abc:123:0:0:0:0:0, but giving out IPv6 address doesn’t work — the client support for getting IPv6 addresses over DHCP is zilch. Easier to set up Teredo.

This is worrisome. Client vendors have been complaining that the ISPs aren’t deploying IPv6 routing and patting themselves on the back for having their systems support IPv6, without considering that it only works if manually set-up. Suppose some ISP did do all the work of making its network route IPv6 — their customers still aren’t going to be on the IPv6 net, because their computers never ask for IPv6 addresses over DHCP so the ISP never gives them any. Are we expecting each one to call customer support for their IPv6 address and how to tell it to their system? The Internet has as many users as it does because the software lets the computers be plugged together and figure out how to talk on their own, without the user having to know how any of that works. IPv6 can’t work until that’s the case for it as well. If reading an RFC ever enters the picture, you lose: 99.9% of the Internet’s users won’t bother. It has to be made so transparent that the end user needs to do nothing and won’t even notice that another routing protocol is processing the packets.

The airhook and liboop sites are now at http://airhook.ofb.net and http://liboop.ofb.net.
They used to be under .org, but when they expired (and they were set to auto-renew), Dotster transfered them to “DSTR Holdings”. Dotster didn’t update the whois, which still shows Dan Egnor as the domains’ owner, but otherwise are not recognizing his claim to them.

The old airhook site is now a generic parked domain page, with Google Adsense for Domains links. The old liboop is a copy of the old liboop grabbed from archive.org, with some Playboy links thrown in.

Want to register your domains with a company which is using a subsidiary to jack your domains as they expire? I didn’t think so.