A friend of mine buzzed me yesterday about his missing route objects. Later multiple other ISPs told the same story which triggered me to put this as a question on INNOG Mailing list. Many folks replied of missing route objects there and it seems to be limited to IRINN members only. I also asked the same question on APNIC mailing list and it was again confirmed about the issue. Before I proceed further, here’s what it is all about.

Lately, I have been playing with many tools and as one gets into deploying those tools, SSL comes as a pain point. A large number of web-based tools I use are internal and on a private network. VPN (with OSPF running over FRR) takes care of connectivity but still, it’s good to have SSL on these machines. Non-HTTPs websites are getting more & more ugly with browsers and even things like password managers do not fill the passwords anymore on their own for non-HTTPS websites.

Back in 2017 Google shared details about Espresso which is their SDN solution for scaling up their routing. Saw this fascinating presentation from Google at SIGCOMM 2017. This blog post covers it in detail besides the talk. Key design principles for their routing platform Hierarchical control plane consisting of both global as well as local control. Global takes care of overall traffic flow, inputs coming from performance metric etc while local take care of failure of BGP sessions, port/device failure etc.

Day 16 of lockdown here in Haryana due to Covid19. Time for some distraction. Last week it was reported that Wireguard will be added in next version of Linux kernel. I have been using Wireguard from over a year and it has been working great. I replaced OpenVPN with Wireguard for both site to site VPN as well as client-server VPN. If you are looking for a free open source VPN for remote employees or just connecting to your own remote servers Wireguard can be a really good candidate.

A fascinating lecture by Mr Anil Swarup (retired IAS, ex-Secretary to Govt. of India & State Govt of UP) at Lt Governer, Puducherry Raj Niwas. His Wikipedia page here and Twitter account here. The first half is the talk itself, followed by some time of Q&A, followed by a short talk by Mr Ashwani Kumar (Chief Secretary to Government of Pondicherry) and in the end is Lt Governor Kiran Bedi.