In a recent Network AF podcast Avi Freedman (Kentik) joked with the guest about how he finds who is transit free / tier 1 network. He said, “I ask everyone who they think is a tier 1 network. Everyone includes their own name + other names”. Next, he ignores the self-nomination & looks at the common list to find who actually is a tier 1 network. This is funny, intuitive and gives some clue.
CERT-IN i.e Computer Emergency Response Team, India issued new guidelines on 28th April. Guidelines essentially ask those VPN providers to keep a log of customer details, their IP addresses, emails, phone numbers etc and maintain that log for at least 5 years. The detailed notification is here.
This not only extends to VPN players but also to datacenters, VPS, cloud service providers etc. I can understand the problem they are trying to solve as most criminal activities are hidden behind VPN players and investigating agencies just hit a dead end as they see the WAN IP of a VPN player.
In the early phase of Russia - Ukraine war, Ukraine made a strange request to ICANN. They asked ICANN to remove .ru (Russian ccTLD) from the root DNS servers, revoke SSL certs for .ru and shut down root DNS servers hosted in Russia.
Here are the three requests they made:
Complete letter is here (and original source is here). This is going to be one of few notable cases where critical internet infrastructure is being weaponised. ICANN declined the request for good. Due to my limited understanding of Russia, Ukraine, US, EU, NATO etc I am not going to comment on the conflict itself. But coming to the critical infrastructure part - this reminds me of my earlier blog post on Doomsday and DNS resolution.
I am in Bangalore for two days. While there are many things packed into these two days short schedule, one of the most exciting ones is Google Global Network India Innovation Summit. While Google has presented across various events in past talking about their AS15169 backbone, this is the first summit where they are covering it in detail and that too with the Indian context!
Must say that I find AS15169 quite fascinating on the BGP side of things. A massive network which follows “cold potato” routing i.e keeping the majority of traffic over IGP over larger locations, terminating BGP sessions on the virtual appliance with SDN backing, a pretty robust failover design with BGP + DNS taking care of server(s) and even entire PoP failing. I blogged about them back in 2020 here. So this should be fun!
Lately, I have been struggling to keep latency in check between my servers in India and Europe. Since Nov 2021 multiple submarine cables are down impacting significant capacity between Europe & India. The impact was largely on Airtel earlier but also happened on Tata Comm for a short duration. As of now Airtel is still routing traffic from Europe > India towards downstream networks via the Pacific route via EU > US East > US West > Singapore path. Anyways, this blog post is not about the submarine cable issue.