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If you have a service in our shared space in Global Switch Sydney, it’s time to be on the move! Notices have been issued to all members who are affected and have been advised that the date for shutdown is Thursday, January 27 2022. If you need to relocate your services, please choose one of our established permanent racks or another alternative location.

Unfortunately, these racks are no longer feasible for us to operate as they are not backed by a contract, are physically shared, and are poorly documented. They are not capable of providing the level of service members expect from us as they are restricted by the multi-tenanted nature of Global Switch, which has caused issues with the design and resilience. Additionally, the switching hardware has also reached the end of life and will not be utilised in future on the IX.

If you have any questions or require any assistance, please get in touch with our tech team at peering@internet.asn.au

We are happy to announce that Aussie Broadband has delivered two new transit services to IAA. Over the next month, our engineers will be working towards migrating AS10084 to the new paths, and any members affected by the changes will be notified accordingly.

Using the new paths means we can reduce complexity by retiring old hardware and standardise the hardware in use for the AS10084 across Australia.

Once this network is up and running, we plan to increase visibility to our members by providing shiny new, advanced looking glasses – Hyperglass!

Members may remember that a number of years ago we inherited a hosting environment called Bur.st, offering email, DNS, and web hosting with shell access. The system runs on a rather dated Linux distribution and we are pleased to announce a new approach to the system.

As a member benefit, we would like to offer interested members a new hosting environment with plesk access, DNS and mail, with the potential to offer a trimmed time bound shell access. We plan to offer this on a trial basis for the next 12 months to gauge whether members find it useful.

The existing Bur.st system would be decommissioned, as it cannot support appropriate security, such as SSH, so current users would have to migrate their own data over. We see this as a useful member benefit to professional members and those operating small businesses wanting a secondary DNS.

We will be in touch with users over the next couple of months to get the migration going.

Our tech team had a rude reminder of when to use bi-directional failure detection (BFD), and when not to, that led to a rather full excursion into bug hunting. We all know that BFD is best used when you have a multi-point layer two connection with multiple pieces of active equipment in the path, such as a tunnel or series of devices in bridging mode. The logic being that BFD will detect a failure on the end-to-end path when the individual physical links are mostly – but not all – working and save the effort and time of a routing protocol reconvergence. The issue that arose was that one of our switches was retaining a path in hardware, when the software had marked it as deleted, so the hardware would forward, but the software would not. Turns out, there’s a bug which causes point-to-point OSPF sessions to fail. If you see some early morning VLANs being rearranged, rest assured your packets are being passed while we purge the state tables. It also means we’re removing unnecessary protocols on direct point-to-point links but will retain it where is makes sense such as our intercapital links.

IAA has been notified of the upcoming closure of Melbourne’s old Primus DC, located at 55 King Street. We have been advised by Vocus that we need to vacate the premises by August 1st. Unfortunately this means members with ports within the datacentre will be affected as IAA will no longer be able to continue offering services from this facility. Members should rest assured that we are working hard to ensure your services are not affected by this closure and ask anyone with a current service at 55 King to migrate to any of the other sites in VIC-IX. All location options can be found on our website. If you need more information or help with your migration, email peering@internet.asn.au

IAA Engineers, Washif and Aaron will be taking a road trip (COVID willing) to Melbourne next month to undertake scheduled upgrades at Melbourne’s NextDC M1. The work is necessary as the current BDX8 has reached the end of its service life and we are replacing it with our brand new X870. The new switch offers better port density and 100Gbps, something the current BDX8 lacks.

Following a request for greater capacity at our B2 site, IAA Engineer Aaron Chidiac headed up to Queensland this week to upgrade the Brisbane site to support 100Gbps ports.

The upgrade was scheduled for last year however COVID delayed our plans to complete the job.

Back at the start of this year you may remember IAA dropped set up fees for 100Gbps ports at all of our IXes, so if you are looking to increase your capacity through QLD-IX you now have options at both Next DC B1 and B2 sites.

To improve BGP performance and reliability with the Internet Routing Registry (IRR), IAA has now created an AS-SET for each of our Internet Exchanges. This will allow networks who support IRR filtering to generate route filters for the Route Server sessions. The following AS-SETs have been created and will be automatically updated daily at 10am AEST:

AS7606:AS-ALL
AS7606:AS-ACT-IX
AS7606:AS-NSW-IX
AS7606:AS-QLD-IX
AS7606:AS-SA-IX
AS7606:AS-VIC-IX
AS7606:AS-WA-IX

If you have any questions or for more information email peering@internet.asn.au

Freshly activated at the time of writing is a brand spanking new L-Root connected into NSW-IX, with routes appearing right across IX Australia, thanks to a new partnership with ICANN. With another root instance appearing on the network your DNS lookups should be lightning fast. This means we have the I-Root on WA-IX and the L-Root in the east. Coupled with member Cloudflare’s distribution of the E, F and J-Roots, and other DNS registry operator members, your DNS performance should be second to none.

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