Shortly after my post revealing that RSAWeb (among others) provide hosting for known South African spammers, I got an email from their Technical Director, Mark Slingsby, asking how recent my lookups were1, and requesting me to name the offenders2 so that his sysadmin team can follow up. I replied with a detailed response, noting that [...]
Tagged fail, ispa, RSAWeb, spammersThis morning I read this article on MyBroadband about the ISPA “hall of shame” list of South African spammers, and conducted a quick (somewhat non-scientific) investigation to see where the mail servers for the domains provided on the ISPA list are hosted. After filtering out domains without MX records, MX records without valid A records, [...]
Tagged hosting, ispa, spammersAfter a year and and a bit as a software developer at the Remote Sensing Research Unit of the CSIR’s Meraka Institute, I’ve now transferred to a new team (still inside Meraka), where I’ll be working on SANReN‘s design and roll out, thus moving the focus of my day job back to networks. SANReN will [...]
Tagged csir, dayjob, sanrenSomeone did a Google search for “how to price ip transit costs south africa”, and ended in my apache logs when they followed the search result to this site. Having never worked in the ISP industry, I’m not really qualified to answer, but here goes anyway: If you have this much bandwidth: …then do this: [...]
Tagged because you asked, pricing, transitAn Internet exchange or peering point provides layer 2 switching to enable direct and efficient interconnect for parties who wish to enter into peering or transit agreements. You get a port and an IP, then you get to use one MAC address to exchange IP packets with other customers. So, back in the nineties, Telkom [...]
Tagged africa inx, internet exchange, lies, peering, SAIXMotivated by frustration, our 5-year old dachshund launched a Distributed Denial of Service attack on our Internet connection, but failed (left). He made quick work of a nearby antenna feed coaxial cable, and he’s destroyed much tougher things, but he couldn’t nail this UTP cable… I suspect the 24V DC on one of the copper [...]
Broadband Infraco was issued an I-ECNS license, but refused an I-ECS license, meaning they’re permitted to provide wholesale, but not retail services. Dominic Cull commented on an earlier post of mine: The whole IECS debate now seems pretty irrelevant given that the Minister of Comms has decided they will not get one .. To allow [...]
Tagged broadband infaco, doc, DPE, telkomDHCP can be used to set the interface MTU on end hosts using option 26. For example (with dnsmasq), to set the MTU of clients on the lan interface to 1400 bytes, use: dhcp-option=lan,26,1400 I’m using this to work around MTU issues caused by a tunnel. It seems to work well so far… no need [...]
Tagged dhcp, fragmentation, MSS, MTU, tunnelsUpdate: Added MIT License. IP sub-netting is one of the first things one learns about network administration. You have a /22, you want /24′s, 2 bits give you 4 sub-nets. Or you want one /24, so you break the /22 into two /24′s and a /23. Not rocket science. It’s the kind of thing you [...]
Tagged bgp, ddos, prefix hijack, python, subnettingHaving lived in Cape Town for 2.5 years, and then moved back in Gauteng, I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about why people regard the city as an ideal start-up hub. Yesterday’s Silicon Cape event seems to have spurred some local but non-Captonian bloggers into asking the same question, and concluding that there is [...]
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