Let's make internet in Boston great again!

Recently, the Markley Group (owner of 1 Summer Street carrier hotel) started the Boston Internet Exchange (BostonIX) to help promote the growth of internet traffic in Boston.

Through its humble beginnings, BostonIX is starting to attract major content players (like Akamai and two unnamed $large_providers) and numerous local access ISPs, all of which are currently working to join the IX to peer.

In cooperation with the Markley Group, TowardEX recently presented to the local BostonIX community to give basic primer into carrier BGP for networks that are new to internet exchange points.  If more people are interested, we're more than happy to make additional presentations! :)


To join the cause and help promote the growth of internet traffic in Boston, TowardEX is donating 10Gig waves to the BostonIX on our metro optical fiber ring, spanning through downtown Boston and Somerville.  ISPs and networks in Boston are encouraged to join the BostonIX -- let's make internet great in Boston again!

Currently, following members have joined or are in the process of joining the BostonIX:

TOWARDEX Carrier Services	206.108.236.1	27552
Akamai Technologies, Inc.	206.108.236.2	20940
RCN	206.108.236.4	6079
OCCAID	206.108.236.5	30071
Free Software Foundation (GNU)	206.108.236.6	22989
Packet Clearing House	206.108.236.7; 206.108.236.8	3856
Cambridge Bandwidth Consortium	206.108.236.9	10255
Vermont Telephone	206.108.236.11	17356
DSCI Corporation	206.108.236.12	33748
Studsvik Scandpower, Inc.	206.108.236.13	53389
Eze Castle Integration, Inc.	206.108.236.15	14717
Intelligent Technology Solutions	206.108.236.16	54611
USAi.net	206.108.236.17	10653
Outscale, Inc.	206.108.236.18	53306
RGTS-USA, Inc.	206.108.236.19	14669
Routed.org	206.108.236.20	61126

JUNOS software patches - Phase 1 Complete

You may be wondering about our recent maintenance notification to address security vulnerability on numerous routers.  There are also rumors about number of large backbone providers patching routers everywhere recently in the past several weeks.  You may have also heard about this, this and this.

This is the infamous PSN-2013-01-823 security vulnerability announcement by Juniper Networks (#PR 839412).   The announcement outlines a potentially serious security flaw where a specially crafted TCP packet (which, could also be spoofed to bypass a fair amount of perimeter packet filters) which will crash the Routing Engine on a Juniper device, causing it to reboot.

While no known exploits currently exist and many provider networks (including ourselves) utilize techniques to protect routers (best practices such as loopback/control-plane filtering, backbone perimeter protection and BCP38), network providers are not taking any chances -- and we're not taking chances either.


We have now completed patching roughly 70% of all Juniper-based devices on our network.  The remaining Juniper devices will be patched next Saturday (March 2, 2013) from 3:00 to 6:59 AM eastern time as noted in our scheduled maintenance notification.

The new software code was regression tested in the lab for a couple of weeks, and the patches have gone accordingly to plan so far.  We expect the remaining upgrades next weekend to be painless.  If you have any particular concerns or questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at anytime.


We will update you on this as work continues next weekend.

Welcome to our blog!

Welcome to our blog!

Going forward, we will post information about improvements and upgrades taking place on our network here.  Updates will also be posted on Twitter, with extended information being provided here at the blog.


-TWDX Network Team