Schools Broadband / Talk Straight - Romanian IP Address!

[Gary91]

Hi All

 

Talk Straight/Schools Broadband has recently made a massive change to their IP ranges and are now using IP range blocks that are assigned to Romania. We have seen issues with a few services we use and I wondered whether there was anyone else out there that have noticed service issues based on their IP address being Romanian!

[sted]

i know when my schools first moved to them they all thought you were in the states so no iplayer etc (and some sites still think we are iirc crucial for one)

[clockend25]

There was an issue with BBC content immediately after we moved to the hosted solution, but that was sorted fairly quickly and there haven't been any similar issues since. What are you experiencing?

[synaesthesia]

Can't say I'm entirely surprised; it's not always about geolocations/blocks, with IPV4 addresses in such sparse supply they'll be picked up from anywhere they can get them; the same goes for quite a lot of ISPs no doubt. It does play havoc with some stuff though, for instance our Moodle integration supplier had some IP's that were Chinese despite being 5 miles down the road. We purposefully block all Chinese traffic.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi folks,

 

yes the latest block we purchased was from Romania. I'm sure you're all aware that RIPE has run out so instead of getting them for free I've just had to purchase a big block of them.

 

We have updated RIPE and numerous geo location providers of the new location in the UK. Some geo location providers take a little while longer to update their databases which is why this issue has occurred. It doesn't happen to every site, only select ones but it will disappear shortly.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Gary91]

Hi Dave

 

Two queries then. Firstly why were existing customers not allowed to keep there existing addresses? Secondly, why were we not given more time to prepare for the change over, I think I have 7 days to organise external DNS records etc. This is just one thing in a long list of technical problems I have faced with Schools Broadband in the six months I have been working with you. I'd welcome a discussion with you away from this forum if possible as I have lost faith in the first line support teams there.

[SchoolsBroadband]

1. As we have severed our ties with a former supplier who badly let us down and I have no faith in not trust. Those IP's were effectively leased from them so they are to be handed back so they can have no influence on our network. Please not all of our customers are effected. Only a small subset of them.

 

2. That's no good. During recent surveys the vast majority of our customers are happy. I'll send you a PM and you can chat to me personally as I always want to listen and help our where I can.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Gary91]

Thanks dave. I'll give you a call in the next 10 minutes.

 

Gary

[SchoolsBroadband]

FYI all after speaking with Gary (a very nice chap) we've found that its not the fact that the IP's were purchased from Romania. It's a Microsoft problem as the IP's have never been used before and effectively their mail server didn't trust them. There's many examples of this on Microsoft TechNet and other sites happening to other ISP's using new IP ranges.

 

Gary and Schools BB are in touch to get MS to sort their mailservers out.

 

Thanks all

 

Dave

[SchoolsBroadband]

MS have allowed Gary's IP range within a few hours so that problem was fixed pretty quickly. We've also changed our processes when adding new ip ranges which have never been routed to actively contact MS prior to giving the ips out to customers.

 

I think it's more MS being super cautious when trying to prevent spam as spammers often try and spoof ip addresses.

 

Thanks and glad it's sorted.

 

Dave

[jonnykewell1]

Glad Gary got this sorted, the primary school that I support had a smooth transition over to the new IP thank you.