Last week I noticed that F root was showing poor connectivity with Indian RIPE Atlas probes for F-root. The graph looked really terrible. Telekom Germany I traced to it from one of RIPE Atlas probes and saw this trace: Probe #6107 1 2401:7500:fff0:1::1 0.838 ms 0.747 ms 0.632 ms 2 2400:5200:1c00:d::1 1.755 ms 1.745 ms 1.726 ms 3 2403:0:100::2be 2.089 ms 2.054 ms 2.049 ms 4 2404:a800:2a00::13d 45.589 ms 26.274 ms 33.

A few weeks back I got in touch with Marc from Meghalaya. He offered to host RIPE Atlas probe at Shillong and that’s an excellent location which isn’t there on RIPE Atlas coverage network yet. It took around 5 days for the probe to reach Shillong from Haryana. I think probably this probe is the one at the most beautiful place in India. :) Now that probe is connected, I thought to look into routing which is super exciting for far from places like Shillong.

Seems like NPIX traffic has started hitting 1Gbps levels and that is just so amazing. Came across this post by Niranjan. NPIX or Nepal Internet Exchange is located in Kathmandu and operates out of its own datacenter. There’s a huge amount of (overhead) dark fibre availability in Kathmandu and as of the writing of this post I see 30 members at NPIX. 1Gbps might seem low from Western IX’es standards but that’s a quite good amount of traffic for an IX in South Asian region.

I recently came across an excellent draft at IETF by Job Snijders & friends. This is to address scenarios where a network might miss communication about a maintenance activity when BGP shutdown happens. Once implemented, this can potentially offer to send peer a message with up to 128 bytes with info about shutdown like “Ticket XXX: We are upgrading the router, will be back live in 1hr” etc. It depends by appending such data to the sys notification which is part of BGP protocol.

Today I was having a chat with my friend Hari Haran. He mentioned that Facebook has started its PoP in Mumbai. This seems true and Facebook has mentioned GPX Mumbai as their private peering PoP in their peeringdb record. I triggered a quick test trace to “www.facebook.com” on IPv4 from all Indian RIPE Atlas probes and resolved “www.facebook.com” on the probe itself. The lowest latency is from Airtel Karnataka and that’s still hitting Facebook in Singapore.