Technology at Harley

One of the features of our new internet connection is native IPv6 connectivity. As the IPv4 address space is exhausted and will soon be very expensive to get addresses, IPv6 needs to be on everyone’s radar. Our ten year old layer-3 core switch doesn’t support IPv6 but I was able to bring up a virtual Linux server to do the routing. Obviously this isn’t an ideal situation, but until we can get a more up-to-date router, this should work for giving all our servers v6 addresses.

Fibertech gave us a /48 block of addresses. That’s 2^(128-48) or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 addresses! I’m hoping that’s enough. If you were to scan 1 million of our addresses every second it would take you 3 times the age of the universe to scan them all.

For a few years now I’ve been trying to get a metro-ethernet connection at school for our internet access. This year we finally managed it. We were using Time Warner’s highest bandwidth package, 50/5Mbps Wideband, but it just wasn’t enough. Their DOCSIS connections are still best-effort with no service-level agreements and that wasn’t quite good enough either.

We ended up signing a contract with Fibertech Networks for a 30/30Mbps metro-ethernet connection over fiber. They gave us a /27 block of IPv4 addresses and a /48 block of IPv6 addresses. I’ve been very happy with the whole process so far. The fiber was pulled on time (and I got to watch them do it) and the service was turned up right on schedule. There were no IP address SNAFUs like the last time with TWC and so far it’s working just as it should.

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