by William Waites
03 Jan 2013

Rerouting Fun and Games

The weather was against us over the holidays. Power outages at Sabhal Mór Ostaig partitioned the network. The wind blew the mast in the Coille Mhialairigh out of alignment with Eigg and the college and disloged a power connector up on the Sgurr. An upstream router in the UHI network failed, and our old core router from the original Tegola network is still missing in action.

To a great extent, we were able to maintain connectivity through this storm, though it required some manual intervention and trickery. This article is kind of a post mortem examination of what went wrong, and why and how it was fixed together with some thoughts on how some of the transitions might be made to happen more smoothly the next time.

The first indication for me that something was wrong came, naturally, from the monitoring system – which is just the Nagios software running on a computer that connects to the network over a VPN. Mailboxes were filled to overflowing with alerts loudly proclaiming that “everything” was “down”. Oh dear. Looking into this it quickly became apparent that the far end of the VPN connection was unreachable – the far end being a Linux PC that is also the original core router for the old experimental network.

Speaking with Peter, who was on site, we found that the VPN gateway was also unreachable from within the network, and that while our new core router at SMO was functioning, connectivity to the outside world had failed a couple of hops beyond it within the UHI network. This is a bad failure mode because the router can’t detect it directly, it just has a default route pointing out through its neighbour, and as its neighbour was up it just kept sending traffic into the void a little way further out. UHI/SMO are not equipped to use a routing protocol like BGP out there at the college that would have detected this condition.

Because our router couldn’t detect the failure, traffic couldn’t automatically fail over to our alternative upstream connection, the bundle of DSL lines that Hebnet has in Mallaig. Ok, simple enough, remove the default route on the core router, and now traffic starts flowing out through Mallaig. But there’s a problem: the DSL lines there are still set up for use on Knoydart, with a policy-based routing arrangement instead of load balancing. This will take a little explaining.

Historically the DSL lines were ordered from BT retail because at the time, it seemed to be the obvious thing to do. BT cannot support any kind of bonding or aggregating or inverse-multiplexing of lines. As clients we can’t really do anything about that directly. To load balance the choice of which line a given packet is going to go down has to be made before it enters the line. BT controls the equipment on that end and they won’t do this. So the ancient workaround was to have the router in Mallaig assign certain client networks to certain lines and to do address translation so BT couldn’t see this happening.

There are several problems with this approach, but the one biting us in this case was configuration skew – this router needs to know in detail which subnets are present in the network and which line they should be assigned to. But everybody started using the fast connection at the college long ago and the network evolved significantly since then and now the configuration on the Mallaig router was hopelessly out of date.

The first thing was to restore some level of connectivity for everybody. This meant ripping out the policy-based routing cruft and making everyone share a single line. There is no way a single line could handle the volume of traffic normally experienced by the network, but degraded service is better than no service. The next step was then to restore some level of aggregation over the multiple lines.

In the meanwhile, in order to relieve congestion on the Hebnet (Knodyart) line that was now being shared over all the Small Isles and up to Knoydart and Loch Hourn, Eigg and Rum manually switched over to their own backup DSL lines.

Well, not quite the next step. There are still some stragglers that continue to use the old experimental network. But the router that connects that network to the new one and to Hebnet had died. Fortunately there are still a couple of places where the old and new Tegola networks touch. These links, at Beinn Sgritheall and Corran are normally just used for out of band access for experiments, but in this case, turning on OSPF to leak routes between them resulted in merging the two autonomous systems.

Back to load-balancing. The first tactic was to try to be clever and do things the Right Way. Andrews & Arnold is a friendly and clueful ISP whose staff is often reachable on holidays and at strange hours of the night, and is a reseller of Openreach DSL. I remembered from some early experiences with Bell Canada resellers that the PPP session is directed to one reseller or another based on the “domain” part of the PPP username, that is the part after the ampersand. Maybe if we could direct the PPP sessions on those DSL lines to A&A they would be able to take care of the far end part of the load-balancing. Unfortunately it turns out that the way the Openreach network is constructed, this will only work for the newer 21CN network and not the first generation 20CN ADSL. And the Mallaig exchange, like most of them outside the big cities in Scotland, has not been upgraded. So much for that idea.

Well, the alternative is tunnels. One tunnel on each line to some place out on the Internet (hopefully nearby) under our control so we can decide how traffic gets distributed. Fortunately we have a FreeBSD router on good bandwidth out on the Internet that could be pressed into service for this. After a little while wrestling with a couple of errors in the Cisco router in Mallaig’s config, all the tunnels were up and all the DSL lines were being used.

But after a little while, some of the users were complaining about intermittent problems, some sites not loading or loading very slowly, without any strong pattern. As well, there were complaints that people couldn’t send email. This last was easy to diagnose. The router is behind a packet filtering router that restricts which hosts can be connected to for sending mail. Usually this makes some sense, the restriction is intended to prevent computers infected by virii from sending spam. But in this case it was preventing legitimate communication – this is often the case with security measures, that when someone tries to do something perfectly reasonable that happens to be at odds with the assumptions of whomever came up with the policy, things break. In any event the fix was to redirect all mail through the university’s mail servers, which is probably also against policy, but at least it works.

Heisenbugs are a little harder to diagnose. We managed, by using the firebug plugin for firefox to find a URL that would consistently hang when a request was made. Fetching it on the command line, and running tcpdump revealed persistent attempts by the web server to send some data followed by responses from the router that said the packets were too big and to send smaller ones or allow them to be fragmented. This is a mechanism called Path MTU Discovery which is supposed to make it possible for any two computers on the Internet to find out the size of the largest packet that can travel between them without being broken into smaller pieces. The “packet too big” messages are ICMP messages, as are the packets used by ping, for example. ICMP messages are often blocked by misguided network administrators that believe there is some security reason to do so. What it really does is prevent computers from finding out that they have tried to send a packet that is too big and that they should send smaller ones. SSL sessions are particularly badly affected by this because they begin with an exchange of large packets for the cryptographic handshake. There’s an article on the Tegola web site that explains PMTUD and MSS Clamping in some detail.

This happens with tunnels because a few bytes (20) need to be used for the encapsulation. The tunnels need a normal outer IP header with addresses visible on the Internet at large, and then an inner IP header containing the addresses used for the tunnel itself. This lowers the Maximum Transmission Unit from what is usually 1500 (standard for ethernet) to 1480. But this wasn’t sufficient. The “packet too big” messages indicated that the tunnel MTU was in fact 1280 even though it had been set to 1480. Well, I still don’t know where those extra 200 bytes disappeared to, but clamping the segment size in the TCP handshake to something that fits into 1280 bytes worked, and as this was a temporary situation in any case, there things stood, finally working properly and consistently.

Now that this is in place, failing over in the future ought to be much smoother. There are some improvements to be made. When the contracts run out on those BT lines they should be moved to a provider that can support load-balancing so we don’t have to do sub-optimal things with tunnels to make it work. Where we do use tunnels, they ought to land on a router outwith departmental firewalls and restrictions intended for desktop computers. Wherever possible, upstreams should use a routing protocol to indicate the presence or absence of connectivity to us so that failures can be detected.


Today the problem with the UHI upstream router was fixed, and it was a simple matter to replace the default route and have everybody back on good bandwidth again, everything back to normal.

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