Over at the "Internet protocol Jornal (issue 10.4) you can find a good read on the dangers of IP spoofing. This problems is very old and very wide known. Even when I was in networking (1997-2002) this was wideley known and there was an easy cure. So I dont understand why Cisco decided to publish this now, a decade ago it would have been yesterdays news.

Everyone who ever read the TCP/IP bible (TCP/IP illustrated) knows this. All you have to configure on a router is IP UNICAST REVERSE PATH, in combination with cisco CEF. Then all packets that are routed are inspected. If the sender address (the From IP address) is in the routing table, it is checked to see if the router would route it the packet would have been send over the same interface the packet orginated from. If so, the sender is valid and the packet is routed, if not, it is proabbly a forged packet and it is dropped. That simple, one command and there is no IP spoofing anymore. In 1998 cisco released this feature I think, a decade ago!

All ISP's (at least in the Netherlands) have this kind of ingress filtering acitvated on their routers since a decade, it is impossible to spoof and route a packet in the Netherlands and most parts of the world for that matter.

I remember though that Casema (which I used as a cable modem provider between 1996-2001) didnt have this feature for some time. You could route a packet towards 1.1.1.1 with the sender address 10.255.255.255. 1.1.1.1 would give an "ICMP unreachable message" from the border routers of casema and it would be send towards the complete internal network -all systems- of Casema creating a kind of internal DoS.

But to publish this article one decade after a decade seems like rerunning old stories. 10 years is on the net a lifetime.

Via Steven Peck, via 21764, the corporate site of AOL is using... Drupal! Note that their developer site has been using Drupal since nearly a year.

I think it is great to see that the big corporations use Drupal, the showcases make it easier to sell Drupal to other corporations, there is more critical mass, more good things will come to and get out of "the community".

Note that there is (or might be) also a dark side. I will blog about the downside soon, but what do you think -apart from the brand AOL- is the downside of corps like AOL using Drupal?

Back in the old days... I did some netmastering for AS1136 (now AS286). And while I am not in to routing anymore, I still like this song performed at the RIPE 55

So bye bye, folks at RIPE 55
Be persuaded to upgrade it or your network will die
IPv6 just makes me let out a sigh
But I spose we'd better give it a try
I suppose we'd better give it a try

See also the grow of the internet and a report from cisco on IPv4 and v6

Other funny quotes:
* ...and all my traceroutes showing stars
* Saw a man with whom I used to peer
* My Cisco shares completely worthless

Do you know that feeling when you have more expertise than those helpdesk employees you're trying to explain your problem? But you need them to set your call through to someone who does know shit? And they are trying their best to help you but have absolutely no idea what you're talking about or what to do with it?

That feeling, I wonder if there's a name for it...

Now excuse me while I'm going to kill someone
throw my phone against the wall
punch someone in the face
shout
cry.

Since my girlfriend and I are expecting another baby due around 20 November, Brecht will move from here current babyroom to the room that was used by me. So all my computers had to move as well. Last weekend we redid the wooden floor again (oiling), this weekend I moved my computers to the second floor. I rewired the PSNT/ADSL, moved my computers (closed the current case of Willt, this website since it had one harddisk outside), did the switches, the wireless etc. Then I booted and sure enought Linux was comming up fine. And even the ADSL worked, like a charm. Or so it seems.

The connection was very very slow. I open standard some 20 sites in firefox on my laptop and they loaded like when I had PSTN or even worse casema cable in the late 90ies. Showing Pat and mat videos to my doughter (buurman en buurman for the Dutch) from youtube, I found out that the loading took longer then the display time, not normal for the quality connection I have to XS4ALL. Doing some speedtest I saw that my download speed dropped from the normal 4Mb to 200Kb while my upstream capacity stayed at 600Mb (no torrents in the background).

And even worse, when I was doing a huge test download, the ADSL connection dropped after 10 seconds I had a link, so I had to shut the interface on my Linux box or my ADSL modem just to have 10 seconds of slow internet connection. Try to troubleshoot your connection without having a one!

Since I did some netmastering back in the 90-ies, I knew I was going to solve this one. The first thing I saw was that not the ADSL connection was dropping but the ethernet from my Linux box to my ADSL router. So it was local and should be easy to solve. Somehow, the link on my eth1 going to my modem was 10Mb full duplex auto negotiate. Now autonegotiate is bad and if you know the wirespeed on both sides, never use it!

So once I did a

and the line was stable and fast again! I dont know how the wrong speed was changed. But I am sure glad to be online again. And I might have solved some other problems my website has as well. I'll keep you posted.