Current News
This page contains news items related to SixXS happenings and operations. This will also be the place where public announcements will be made available.
A separate PoP status page displays the status of the various PoPs.
One can consult the Tickets for other outstanding issues.
A New King and Queen
Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
Congratulations to His Royal Majesty The King William Alexander and Queen Maxima!
We wish you a grand reign of The Netherlands for many years to come!
We also would like to thank Princess Beatrix for her 33 year long reign as Queen of The Netherlands.
Long overdue, but finally implemented, tested and enabled: As of today we have enabled STARTTLS support for our TIC servers available as tic.sixxs.net, which is the default TIC server in AICCU.
When a TIC client, such as AICCU, connects to a TIC server and issues a TIC 'starttls' command the TIC server will now start a TLS session, this way all further communications between the client and the TIC server are encrypted. This is especially important to avoid snooping of the heartbeat password used for both the AYIYA and heartbeat protocols.
AICCU currently has it's 'requiretls' option set to false, one could now enable this by setting it to true to make it require STARTTLS.
With the 'requiretles' default of false AICCU would still attempt STARTTLS but the server still had the option to reject this request.
This of course allows a transparent upgrade of the server and we are now seeing most TIC sessions performing STARTTLS.
Of course, as usual if you have feedback, don't hesitate to bring it up on our contact address, as a ticket for operational issues or in the Make It Better forums for general suggestions.
Forum Message posting previews
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013
We have finally added a crucial bit of a missing forum feature: Message posting previews.
Thus from now on, when you try to post a message in the forum or file a ticket you will have the option to preview the post. In case there is an error in the markup you will be shown these errors and given the ability to correct them.
This should provide a much better forum experience.
This feature was requested in the Make it Better Sub-Forum.
Slowly, due to time constraints, we are resolving various outstanding issues that are not of direct operational impact.
Of course, as usual if you have feedback, don't hesitate to bring it up on our contact address, as a ticket or in the Make It Better forums.
Additional to this change, a reply to a message now [quote]s the original message and attributes it in a similar way to what most email clients do it.
sixxsd 2013.03.05 deployed on all PoPs
Tuesday, March 5th, 2013
We have upgraded the sixxsd on all the PoPs to the current 2013.03.05 version, thus brand new.
This version was running on some of the PoPs already to resolve some minor issues we encountered and for instance to determine the Airport problems (see also the forum thread for other details).
Because of that issue and to make it possible for users to see this, one new Live Tunnel Status detail is now available that shows a counter and the last source address of ICMPv4 errors received by the PoP in relation to your endpoint address.
This counter can indicate when your endpoint is rejecting packets from the PoP, which is what the Airport problem showed.
Likely this is also a useful indicator for other setups, eg where the ISP is rejecting protocol-41 packets (though typically if proto-41 is filtered on the ISP level they do not send ICMP either).
Another small update in this new version of sixxsd is the ability to both ping and traceroute the sixxsd daemon itself (see the FAQ for the details).
As that address is inside the tunnel/subnet prefix for the PoP it is a good indicator that that prefix is properly routed and of course that sixxsd is working.
Though similar can be achieved by tracerouting/pinging the gateway of a tunnel (thus prefix::1).
Of course, like usual, in case of problems, don't hesitate to contact us.
35.000 active users, closing in on 40.000 tunnels
Thursday, February 7th, 2013
According to our usage statistics we have now well over 35.000 active users.
We should also be closing in on to 40.000 active tunnels in a few months.
As the statistics show this represents users in 145 countries around the world.
And indeed, the Vatican is in the list and it is a real entry, they are utilizing an AYIYA tunnel.
Happy 2013!
Tuesday, January 1st, 2013
SixXS wishes everybody a happy and fruitful 2013!
As in other years, in case of problems don't hesitate to contact us.
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