Notes from SANOG 26 - Mumbai

Anurag Bhatia
Just finished with SANOG 26 conference and tutorials. It went very nice. Interestingly this time conference did not start early morning like it did in SANOG 24 at Noida. It was rather late in afternoon. Also, on very good note - there were less Govt. bureaucrats to bore attendees with usual stuff they always talk about but have very little idea. One specific interesting presentation was Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless in India by Prof Abhay Karandikar (from IIT Mumbai).

Ease out your IPv6 gateway!

Anurag Bhatia
One of very cool features of IPv6 is link-local address which stays local to a given link. For this fe80::/10 is reserved. A /10 is a huge amount of address space in IPv6 (and in IPv4 too :) ). This means from fe80:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 to febf:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff. Since by design link-local address stays local, the address configured on the upstream/gateway router can be kept same for ease of use and comfort. This wasn’t the case of IPv4 where each VLAN/layer 2 domain had it’s own gateway.

Monitoring, managing and troubleshooting large scale networks

Anurag Bhatia
Came across this excellent presentation of Peter Hoose (Facebook). It gives a very good logical way of troubleshooting problems. Less about actual problems but about how Ops members companies like Facebook troubleshoot them. This is from NANOG 64. Enjoy the presentation. :)

BGP Peering: Why it's tricky to measure peerings?

Anurag Bhatia
Few days back a friend of mine (who works for an ISP) congratulated me for joining HE. Along with wishes he told me that our bgp.he.net doesn’t works well and the reason he fealt so is because he couldn’t see all peers for his ASN in our tool. This is not a problem and to be more broader - same applies on all popular tools other then bgp.he.net like RIPE Stats, Robtex AS analysis etc.