It starts with a handshake...
An interesting promo video on Internet peering and why it is important in context of Africa by Internet Society.
An interesting promo video on Internet peering and why it is important in context of Africa by Internet Society.
This week I presented in bdNOG 4 on “Misused top ASNs”. It was a study we at Hurricane Electric did to see how many times AS1, AS2 and AS3 appeared in global routing table between 2010 and 2015. This highlights cases where AS1, AS2 or AS3 appeared as a result of wrong prepend.
My presentation is embedded below:
Overall bdNOG 4 had been a great experience. It’s good to see a nice NOG community actively sharing technical know-how, sharing experiences, and much more. I must say that is something I greatly miss in India. More on bdNOG conference later on.
Sitting at Kolkata airport. Noticed the usual “Free Wifi in the area!” message and connected to Tata Docomo Free wifi. Performance was quite poor. Two key issues with wifi:
Here are some of traces to random locations:
There seems be an ongoing route leak by AS49505 (Selectel, Russia) for K root server.
K root server’s IP: 193.0.14.129
Origin Network: AS25152
Here’s trace from Airtel Looking Glass, Delhi PoP
Mon Oct 26 16:21:18 GMT+05:30 2015
traceroute 193.0.14.129
Mon Oct 26 16:21:22.053 IST
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 193.0.14.129
1 \*
203.101.95.146 19 msec 4 msec
2 182.79.224.73 14 msec 3 msec 1 msec
3 14.141.116.89.static-Delhi.vsnl.net.in (14.141.116.89) 7 msec 3 msec 2 msec
4 172.23.183.134 26 msec 45 msec 26 msec
5 ix-0-100.tcore1.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.38.5) 151 msec 153 msec 152 msec
6 if-9-5.tcore1.WYN-Marseille.as6453.net (80.231.217.17) \[MPLS: Label 383489 Exp 0\] 160 msec 163 msec 155 msec
7 if-2-2.tcore2.WYN-Marseille.as6453.net (80.231.217.2) \[MPLS: Label 595426 Exp 0\] 161 msec 162 msec 162 msec
8 if-7-2.tcore2.FNM-Frankfurt.as6453.net (80.231.200.78) \[MPLS: Label 399436 Exp 0\] 149 msec 151 msec 155 msec
9 if-12-2.tcore1.FNM-Frankfurt.as6453.net (195.219.87.2) 164 msec 163 msec 159 msec
10 195.219.156.146 153 msec 151 msec 160 msec
11 spb03.transtelecom.net (188.43.1.226) 190 msec 192 msec 189 msec
12 Selectel-gw.transtelecom.net (188.43.1.225) 185 msec 185 msec 185 msec
13 k.root-servers.net (193.0.14.129) 183 msec 204 msec 196 msec
RP/0/8/CPU0:DEL-ISP-MPL-ACC-RTR-9#
The routing information (show route 193.0.14.129 output) from their looking glass doesn’t seems useful since it shows that it’s learning K root Noida route via NIXI. This is likely because routing information is different from actual forwarding information in that device. So the trace looks extremely weird. It’s leading traffic to K root which does has anycast instance in Noida, landing into Russia! Why is that happening? Let’s look at what Tata Communications (AS6453) routing table has for K root’s prefix. I am looking at feed of AS6453 which it’s putting into RIPE RIS RRC 03 collector.
Enjoyed ISC’s presentation about their analysis of F root server (one 13 root DNS servers which power the Internet) about anycast performance gloablly for 192.5.5.0/24 announced (and anycasted) by AS3557 (ISC). This was presentation at UKNOF 32.
Embedded presentation below (or click here to watch on YouTube directly)
K root in Noida seems to be not getting enough traffic from quite sometime and connectivity does seems bit broken. This is a blog post following up to Dyn’s excellent and detailed post about how TIC leaked the world famous 193.0.14.0/24 address space used by AS25152. It was good to read this post from RIPE NCC written by my friend Emile (and thanks to him for crediting me to signal about traffic hitting outside!)
Today I met a good friend and he has recently moved back into Rohtak (like me!) and was crying over BSNL’s issues. He has issues of unstable DSL due to last mile and I told him that even if last mile works well, BSNL still has got ton of issues with their IP backbone traffic. It’s Sunday late night out here in India and I am having really pathetic connectivity with just everywhere except Google. With Google only key difference I noted is that my TCP session to Google’s services is terminating at Mumbai and not Delhi anymore. First and formost, I did trace to spectranet.in (which is last company I was working for) to see how is my latency with server hosting it:
BCP38 - also known as “Network Ingress Filtering” is concept where we filter incoming packets from end customers and allow packets ONLY from IP’s assigned to them. Before going to BCP38, let’s first understand how packets forwarding work:

Here User 1 is connected to User 2 via a series of router R1, R2 and R3. Here R1 and R3 are ISP’s edge routers while R2 is a core router. In typical way the network is setup, entire effort is given on logic of routing table i.e for packets to reach from User 1 to User 2, we need to ensure that User 1 has default route towards R1, knows that User-2’s IP is behind R3 which is reachable via R2. So path User 1 > R1 > R2 > R3 > User 2 comes up. And same for User 2 > R3 > R2 > R1 > User 1 as return path. Now e.g IP pool for User-1 is 192.168.1.0/24 and is using 192.168.1.2 out of it while IP pool for User-2 is 192.168.2.0/24 and is using 192.168.2.2 out of it.

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). In start I felt it to be usual crappy 5G talk but later realized it was much more interesting. I loved the idea “Have 2Mbps everywhere static broadband and not some absurd number on mobile wireless broadband as we hear in case of 3G/4G. Although 2Mbps now is much slower and I would rather suggest that we target for 10Mbps everywhere (something which can be supported by copper/coax/fiber hybrid) but anyways it was nice refreshing talk. His thoughts were interesting but mostly impractical since had high dependence on useless project like NOFN. For the next part, we had a nice theme of keeping network simple which everyone kind of liked. Simplicity in Network Design & Deployments by Dany Pinto (from Colt) and Unified Forwarding with Segment Routing by Mohan Nanduri (from Microsoft Azure Cloud WAN team) were part of that. Santanu Dasgupta gave a presentation about Challenges of L2NID based Metro-E Architecture for vCPE/NFV Deployments and kind of confused everyone. :P