Category: Network

I finished up accounting for the past month this morning and sent off emails to our project members and end users. If you have any questions about your usage, please feel free to reach out to us at our support desk.

Accounting is automated within our NMS but email creation is a manual task performed by our volunteers when they have time to do so. As a result, email timing may vary between months and may done in batches around the 28th. Also, for the past month, not a single member got close to the 600GB de-priority threshold and we had very moderate network use. Another little tid bit, yes…our NMS calls the accounting functions “bills” but MFN/FurrIX does not charge for network access.

Reached out to our data center about pointing the reverse zone for our main /48 to our name servers and they approved it. As of today, we are in control of the reverse zone meaning that we can now set records for our project members and end users.

We have also changed the way we set records for our members and users:

• For all members, when you are given access to a subnet from our project, your subnet will receive a PTR record on the ::0 address in the format <subnet-id>.<member-nickname>.<city>.<state/province>.<country>.<router>.furrix.zone. For example: ‘sub40-64.foxxo.jacksv.fl.us.ikus.furrix.zone’ would show that you have access to the subnet ‘2604:4300:f03:40::/64’ and you are based out Jacksonville, Florida.
• For our members who are sharing their access with another member, the suffix for PTR records will always be <device>.<shared-to-nickname>.<shared-from-nickname>.<city>.<state/province>.<country>.<router>.furrix.zone. For example: ‘slate.smol-dwagon.ty-dwagon.longv.tx.us.catos.furrix.zone’ would show that you are allowing another member to make use of your subnet, possibly for in network routing.
• Members are allowed to supply our network engineers with their own PTR prefixes, given that the chosen prefix makes sense and is not derogatory or otherwise. Device names, floor locations, etc are permitted. Be aware that PTR records are globally viewable.

A better example of the use of PTR records within our project is the record for ‘2604:4300:f03::’ which returns the following data: ’30f.0034.4062.kc.mo.us.furrix.zone’ – ’30f.0034.4062′ is our IPv6 prefix entered backwards which identifies our network. – ‘kc.mo.us’ stands for Kansas City, MO, US which identifies where our network core is operated out of – ‘furrix.zone’ identifies our project as the network operator.

As you can see, having support for this is a massive help to our volunteers when needing to check who is responsible for traffic on our network or for when project members or end users have a protocol or software stack that requires a record is set in order to function properly.

So, when we connect project members to our networks, we enroll the interface on our side into our NMS for accounting. Every project member or end user can make use of up to 600GB of transit each month before being placed into a lower QoS bucket. Or so that it how things are supposed to work.

Our NMS applied its updates on its own daily not needing any real oversight from our team until about four days ago. An update failed to apply correctly which resulted in a complete failure of accounting and a mix up of interface names not matching with their respective subnets. So, in a nutshell, there was zero traffic accounting for about four days because none of the data that was accounted was correct.

This has been sorted out as of this morning and everyone’s monthly usage was reset.