Author Archives: Gary Hawkins

Clueless IPv6 Comment of the Day

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Had to laugh (or possibly cry) at the following quote from reporter Claire Connelly of news.com.au, at http://www.news.com.au/technology/the-internet-has-run-out-of-ip-addresses-and-what-happens-after-that-is-anyones-guess/story-e6frfro0-1225995086627 today:

“Web developers have tried to compensate for this problem by creating IPv6 – a system which recognises six-digit IP addresses.”

The rest of it is so full of errors, I won’t even begin to start pointing them out – but it made me laugh anyway.  If this is the quality of reporting we’re going to get next week when the addresses *do* run out, I think we’re in for a bit of fun…

(In case you weren’t aware, IPv6 addresses aren’t six digits in length – they are 128-bit numbers, which is technically 32 hex digits in length, if all of the leading zeros are present.)

Idle monetary curiosity

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Since my new credit card seems to have “cashback”, this got me thinking – I wonder how much I can spend on a credit card in a month?  Normally, I’m not one to buy things on credit cards except if buying things by mail order (mainly because of the Section 75 Consumer Credit Act 1974 protection), preferring to use my debit card for transactions made in person.

And before you all suddenly think I’ve flipped, I’m not talking about going crazy on buying stuff I can’t afford, but more “how much can I spend on a credit card in a month” with the following rules: (i) You must not use the card for anything that you wouldn’t normally buy in an average month, (ii) You must pay the bill off in full at the end of the month (just as I normally do, btw).

Might be interesting to see how I get on…

IPv4 Exhaustion News: Another bumper day at APNIC

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At APNIC, it seems to have been another fantastic day of handing out loads of IPv4 addresses to the Chinese – today a /10 (or about 4 million addresses) was allocated to China Mobile bringing the total APNIC address pool down to 1.4 /8s, from 1.66 /8s at the weekend, a whopping 0.26 /8s decrease in one day.

There is still rampant speculation on when ‘IANA IPv4 exhaustion day’ will be,  since apparently it’s meant to be a secret – but my guess is still on 00:00 UTC+10 Tuesday 1 Feb (which is about 14:00 UK time Monday 31 Jan).  Can’t come soon enough for me…

Available from all good record shops now :)

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Over the past few months, I’ve been working on an orchestral soundtrack for Cuddington Youth Drama for their next production, “Search for Odysseus” by Charles Way.  It’s a play based around Homer’s Odyssey, but from the son’s (Telemachus) point of view, in the search for his father.  It’s taken a while to get it done – 22 tracks in all, and nothing but the song words to go on, so it’s been a bit of challenge (especially as it’s also the first play score I’ve composed!).  Anyway, the score is all done and recorded now, apart from the obligatory tidying up and necessary spit and polish, and actually finished a week ahead of schedule!

So, if you’re local, don’t forget to come and see it – details on the CYD web site.

Christmas Present Review

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Got a great pile of Christmas presents this year – mainly DVDs of classic children’s TV programmes!  The French and Japanese versions were made in 1982, and first shown in English in 1986/87 on Children’s BBC, then repeated again in 1990, the Mysterious Cities of Gold was a 39-part series made jointly by NHK/RTL loosely based around Scott O’Dell’s book The King’s Fifth, and charts the adventures of three 11/12-year old based children – Esteban, Zia and Tao, along with their Spanish companions Mendoza, Pedro and Sancho (who mainly seem to be interested in getting rich), around South America looking for the Cities of Gold.  It’s amazing how well this series has stood the test of time, and I’ve got to say it was great to be able to watch it again (and only the third time in my life I’ve seen it!).  Although the DVD set was released in the early 2000s, it was never released in English at the time and the English dubbed version finally appeared on DVD last year!

Some info about the series: Wikipedia and a unofficial fan site (in English and French).

The other DVDs were the complete first and second series of Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds.  Produced by BRB Internacional SA in Spain in 1981 (so actually predating MCoG by a year), this was a cartoon animation series based on the Alexandre Dumas story The Three Musketeers.  26 episodes were produced for the first series, and the English version was shown on Children’s BBC in 1985.  I’ve got to say, I don’t think I ever saw every episode when I was a kid, so it took a little while to get the story this time round, but definitely a children’s TV classic.  The second series (‘Return of Dogtanian’) was not shown on the BBC, but shown on ITV in 1990 instead as it was a BRB Internacional/Thames Television co-production.  Having never seen the second series the first time round, I was unsure what to expect, although I remember people saying at the time that it wasn’t as good.  Having watched the first five episodes, I think I have to agree with that – many of the voices have changed, the characters don’t seem quite as well-drawn, and the theme music (a rearrangement of the original) is frankly horrible.  However, I’m beginning to warm to it – so perhaps I’d better watch the rest of the series before I go passing judgment on it.  The second series appears to be based on “The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later”, also by Dumas.

More information on Dogtanian can be found at the Wikipedia entry or at this fan site

Still, I enjoyed watching the first series again, and the second series is growing on me slowly, so I can safely say lots of fun was had watching those!  Here’s hoping for Around the World with Willy Fog next Christmas then :)

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IPv4 should be all gone, except that it isn’t…

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Those of you that have been watching the various “IPv4 exhaustion sites” (including Geoff Huston’s Potaroo site and Stephan Lagerholm’s IPv4Depletion site, as well as the official graph page at APNIC) will know that IANA should have run out of IPv4 addresses last weekend, under normal circumstances.  However this hasn’t happened, and it appears that no-one has “pushed the button”, that is, the day when a RIR asks for the last 2 /8s available for allocation, and thereby triggering a distribution of the remaining 5 /8s one each to each of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

According to comments made from people who should know, the reason this hasn’t happened is that someone, no idea whether IANA, APNIC, or IANA plus all the RIRs, wants to turn this into a massive PR stunt.  So it appears there is an exhaustion day, but it’s a secret.  And that irritates me.  It’s not as if IANA didn’t know this was coming, they could have had the press releases written months ago.

APNIC’s pool is getting lower by the day (at the time of writing this was 1.67 /8s, or 28,017,950 addresses, and the usual threshold for asking for more addresses is about 2.0 /8s.  There are a number of dates it could be, for example, there’s January 31st, Feb 14th, or even the ICANN meeting in March when it is rumoured that Bill Clinton will be coming to speak (but personally I don’t think they can last that long).  It could be today (except that today is a weekend).

I really just wish everyone would stop stalling for time and push the button to start Stage 2.  Whatever day or time it happens, the press are going to be all over it, there’s going to be mass panic in some quarters of the industry, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one or more ISPs or service providers disappear in the next year or two because they just weren’t ready in time and got caught out.  So let’s just push the button now, please IANA? (Well, okay, when you get up!)

28,017,950.72

IPv4 – The end is coming quicker than you think

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Today the news was announced that IANA, the organisation ultimately responsible for allocating IPv4 addresses to the Internet community, has just allocated a further 4 blocks of /8 in one day.  Two of these went to ARIN, the Regional Internet Registry for the North America, one went to AfriNIC, the RIR for the continent of Africa, and one to RIPE NCC, the RIR for Europe.

This means that we now have 7 blocks of /8 left out of a total of 256.  At the beginning yesterday we had 11.  This basically cuts the total free IPv4 space remaining from 4.3% to 2.7%, a decrease of almost half.  Current estimates as of yesterday were predicting that the IPv4 address space would run out at the beginning of March, but with addresses being used so quickly, that might well be December or January.

So what happens now?  Well, as of now, there are 7 /8s left.  If a further two blocks of /8 are allocated, this leaves 5 remaining.  IANA policy is believed to be that when only 5 blocks of /8 are remaining, they will be distributed equally to each of the five RIRs – that is, ARIN, RIPE NCC, LACNIC, AfriNIC and APNIC.  If (as is likely) APNIC require one or more blocks (most probably because of China’s insatiable appetite for new addresses), this means we could be down to 5 /8s very quickly.  And at that point, the last five will be distributed evenly, and we will have run out at IANA, possibly before Christmas.

This begs the question – why is almost no-one is ready for it?  Out of the “sticking plaster” options, Carrier Grade NAT is certainly one solution, (that is, effectively NATing and/or PATing the NATs) but this only works so well until we either run out of addresses *and* TCP/UDP ports, but also means that we will be double, triple or even quadruple NATing our hosts.  This scuppers any chance of PAT (Port Address Translation) working unless all the NATs do the PAT, which is unlikely to be workable, especially when one or more of the NATs are being run by unprepared-for-IPv6 ISPs, and this means that no-one will successfully be able to run servers behind NAT.

So please, ISPs, please stop thinking about rolling out Carrier Grade NAT which will cost ££££££s and start rolling out IPv6 which will also cost ££££££s.  It will cost you less in the long run.  (But I doubt they’re going to listen to me, so if you don’t mind, I’ll just get my metaphorical IPv6-enabled deckchair and sit in it eating my metaphorical IPv6-enabled popcorn whilst watching the chaos ensue.  It really isn’t going to be pretty.)

At some point, the procrastinating ISPs (which currently seems to be all of them) will need to wake up.  Perhaps this will be when people can’t access Google, Facebook, YouTube, iPlayer, <insert popular new service here only available on v6>.  But I can pretty much guarantee the IPv6 roll out will be done in a rush and badly.  If only people had started thinking about this 5 years ago (like the ISP I use did…)

FreeSWITCHover Update

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In my last post, I talked about “The Great FreeSWITCHover” happening this weekend.  So here is a status update:

  • All the live numbers are now moved onto FreeSWITCH (fs for short) and the phone rings (which is always a good start)
  • Incoming and outgoing calls work
  • Voicemail for external numbers works
  • Conference bridge set up (but not allocated to any external numbers yet)

So, a good start.  As far as I know, there is nothing left to do which will stop me making and receiving phone calls, so the switchover has been relatively painless.  What’s left to do now is to find a way of doing all the fiddly but non-essential features that I can do as and when I’ve got time.  Although the most urgent of these is to be able to change the outgoing caller ID to any one of my numbers, but hopefully that shouldn’t take too long to implement.

All in all, a big success so far and I think I can now officially say that Asterisk has been fired!  Goodbye and thanks for all the fish…

The Great FreeSWITCHover

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I am “ringing the changes” this weekend.  Over the past few months I have been getting, frankly, quite frustrated with a relatively new piece of software called FreeSWITCH which is a software PBX (or, in English, a telephone exchange).  Up until recently, I’ve been using a piece of software called Asterisk to do the job, and in many ways it’s worked very well.  But over time I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated by its bugs.  So I’ve been having a look round to see if there is anything “better”.

I decided there were three probable open source software candidates for the job: Kamailio, Asterisk 1.8 or FreeSWITCH.  All three are quite capable in their own little ways, but it was more a case of which one to choose.  So, I installed them all and gave them a try.

Kamailio

Firstly, I tried Kamailio.  This particular product is a derivative of what was originally SIP Express Router.  This product, it is claimed, handles hundreds and hundreds of call setups per second, so it is very suitable for use in large telcos.  Out of the three packages, it is probably the closest thing to what is known as a softswitch in telecoms terms, and is also the closest thing to how the SIP protocol was envisaged to work when it was created.  Unlike the other two products, what Kamailio is best at is setting up, tearing down and routing calls.  Which is great, but unfortunately people expect “features” in their PBXes these days, such as voicemail or conferencing and so on!  With a softswitch, this is typically done by handing off to “feature” servers (which, ironically, are quite often run by PBXes!)

What really put the nail in the coffin for me as far as Kamailio was concerned, was how complex the configuration file was.  It seemed necessary to understand the SIP protocol at a very low level to even begin to understand how to use it.  Whilst I have a good book on this subject, I felt it was massive overkill to need to configure a softswitch at that low a level for what is basically a small home PBX.  A pity, because I think it is probably very good at what it does, but just wasn’t for me.

Asterisk 1.8

This is the very recently (at the time of writing) released version of the existing software that I was using.  Despite the fact that I have been using this software ever since version 1.0, and that’s years and years, over the past few months, I have become increasingly frustrated at the rather stupid bugs that Asterisk (or * for short) contains.  In particular, its SIP support is frankly rubbish.  Until now this hasn’t really been a problem since my service provider offered IAX2 connections to the PSTN, but since they have commissioned a new server, which is SIP only, I felt it was time to move away from IAX2 (which although published as RFC 5456, has never really gained acceptance much beyond the * community) and talk pure SIP.  So I bought myself a good book on the subject, and tried to learn it.  It was mainly through this that I was seeing more and more shortcomings in the SIP implementation in *.  Also, there was in the previous version no IPv6 support (which is going to become increasingly more important in the next year or two), and it is only the SIP stack which is IPv6 enabled – none of the other modules yet support it.

Asterisk is still a hugely popular PBX, and I know many people that use it, but it is fast becoming the “last resort” choice for me now that I am only too painfully aware of its shortcomings.  It’ll be sad to leave it in a way, because I’ve had a lot of fun with it, starting off with a single ISDN2e (Euro-ISDN) line and graduating all the way up to SIP phones with IAX2 trunks and all kinds of fancy features enabled over the years, but enough is enough.  Asterisk is badly in need of a rewrite and needs to start being compliant with some actual standards, and then it may usable again.  It was fun while it lasted though!

FreeSWITCH

So, having been disappointed by Kamailio because it was too complex, and disappointed by Asterisk because it was too buggy, that really only left FreeSWITCH.  I remember getting the source code for the first time and trying to compile it.  It was a nightmare.  Then I discovered that you had to run bootstrap.sh first and then the Makefile appeared.

This must be about my fourth go at installing FreeSWITCH.  The first three times I gave up in disgust.  But, there is something about it that I like, and that is the architecture of it.  FreeSWITCH (fs for short) is designed from the ground up to be modular, and not only that, to use third-party libraries as much as possible.  This is good news because it means that it can use industry-standard libraries like libsofia (derived from code originally written by Nokia) which are fully RFC compliant.

The initial big downside of FreeSWITCH is its XML configuration, and the fact that there is stuff-all documentation supplied with the thing.  In my opinion, it’s a classic case of “programmer-itis”, where the documentation is the code, except that’s no good if you’re not a hotshot programmer (i.e. me).  The wiki does have some documentation on it, but there’s a lot missing, and that’s frustrating.

What is more frustrating is that the sample config is cram-packed full of features, none of which are explained, and no indications of what it’s safe to leave out.  After much experimenting, tearing out of hair and even buying the new FreeSWITCH book (which frankly wasn’t always an awful lot of help, since it just said “use the config we supplied and tweak it” a lot of the time.), I managed to get a very basic configuration going, and I used that as the basis of my experiments.

But … there’s no denying that FreeSWITCH does have a lot going for it, once you begin to understand it.  I found that once I’d got rid of all the dead wood in the configuration and built one up from scratch, it did begin to make a lot more sense.  Now I have it up to the point where it is quite usable, I can see that it actually has many advantages over Asterisk – the primary one being that it’s a cleaner, far better design and hence why I’m going to stick with it, despite the configuration taking weeks to do and involved a painful retraining process.  Give a while, and I think it’ll be a serious contender to Asterisk.

So, FreeSWITCH wins, but what’s happening this weekend?

So, what now?  This weekend marks the official switchover to FreeSWITCH.  Currently my “live numbers” are not on any PBX at all, going straight to the phone so that I can guarantee the calls can get through whilst the new server was being set up.  I have a couple of test numbers on the fs server from two different providers, so that I can test compatibility before I move all the numbers over.

The configuration isn’t finished yet, but most of it is done.  Voicemail is working, and the conferencing server is up, and I can route calls inbound and outbound to and from the PSTN.  Still left to do are conversions of a couple of old Asterisk scripts, plus implementation of ACR (anonymous call rejection) and other assorted bits and pieces like implementation of feature codes, but none of those will stop the incoming calls ringing the phones if they’re not in place.

So, if you can’t get through on the this weekend, that’ll be why … although I don’t expect the job will be too arduous, like most things of this nature, it’s fine if it doesn’t go wrong.  I expect I’ll be blogging again after the event to let you know how well it didn’t work … :)

Everything, Everywhere

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Amongst the deeply exciting (!) things this week I’ve been doing was to enable the supposed marvellous new feature from Everything Everywhere Ltd , the joint venture company that owns Orange UK and T-Mobile UK.  It is now possible to ‘roam’, free of charge between the two networks if you are a customer of the two networks.  The advantage of this is that if you are in an area where there is (say) Orange coverage but not any T-Mobile coverage, the phone will automatically pick up the other network’s signal and start using it, all for no extra charge.

There is one caveat to all this, and that it is currently 2G only.  Eventually, 3G networks will be able to do the same thing but that is coming later, courtesy of an agreement by EEL and Hutchison 3G UK Ltd (Three) to form a company known as MBNL (Mobile Broadband Network Ltd).  This allows both companies to share masts, and eventually should permit Orange, T-Mobile and Three to share networks on both 2G, 3G (and who knows, maybe even 4G).

Another thing I’ve noticed is that you will have to enable roaming on your phone, and also data roaming as well.  Despite the dire warnings that may come up about excessive charges, that won’t happen between Orange and T-Mobile since the roaming is free.  Foreign network roaming will still cost an arm and a leg as usual, though.

To sign up, visit either http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/share or http://www.orange.co.uk/share – it isn’t automatically enabled.