The Area 0

Okay, so everyone and their mothers know about w00t. And I’ve been watching the site for nearly two years, yet to buy something. But today… I opened up the the wallet and made my first purchase. Worthy of a blog post? Not really… but hey, it’s my site and I can fill it as I wish!

So today I purchased the “XtremeMac Portable Battery for iPods“. It claims to add 80 hours of audio or 8 hours of video playback time. I’ll believe it when I see it. Though, if nothing else, it will allow me to not have to hold my iPod in my hand while watching movies on flights.

The one part that cracks me up is a comment left:

“seriously, the ipod battery is plenty fine… this is just something else to make apple money. “

To which my reply was simply:

“Funny, I only got a couple hours of video out of my ipod on my 8 hour flight. I guess that’s plenty fine for you?

I’m buying one, if nothing else, so I dont have to hold my ipod in my hand while watching movies on flights!”

Which is of course not true, but it makes my point. It also amazes me how many people bitch about the iPod on that site… and praise the Zune. I’m not sure I understand…

Today we ran into an issue with our BGP advertisements. To give you a little history, we were allocated 198.49.81.0/24 and 198.49.82.0/24 back in 1993, which was pre-CIDR. (I bet you can see where this is going, already.)

We have been using 198.49.81.0/24 for a number of years, obviously longer then I’ve been at PSU. I was told that we’d never used the “other half” of our assigned IP space. I knew we had two blocks, and earlier this summer I had asked our ISP:

“Should we not be using 198.49.80.0/23?” I did the math a couple times. I checked ipcalc, I knew it was correct. So not realizing that we didn’t own the 198.49.80.0/24 space, we went ahead and advertised 198.49.80.0/23 via BGP. The ISP didn’t catch it, either. A simple mistake.

In the days of CIDR, of course we would be given the /23! It would be just silly not to. In fact, 198.49.80.0/24 is unallocated. It was a simple case of not realizing that the addresses were pre-CIDR, and therefore not contained by a contiguous bit boundary. OOPS.

It wasn’t a big deal to fix it, we simply added the two correct prefixes to our BGP advertisements, and our ISP simply filtered the /23 we were also advertising. There is some more work to be done upstream, I am told, but everything is working as it should at this point.

Props to Cort at KanREN for spotting the issue, and helping us get it resolved.

The MPAA’s Ubuntu-based university network monitoring toolkit software is no longer available for download. An Ubuntu technical board member sent a takedown notice to the group’s ISP noting that the software was being distributed without source code, which is a violation of the GPL.

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