Networking

It’s late night here in India. I am having final 8th semester exams and as usual really bored! 

Though this time we have interesting subjects but still syllabus is pretty boring spreading across multiple books, notes and pdf’s. Anyways I will be out of college after June which sounds good.

Tonight, I found a routing glitch. Yes a routing glitch!! :)

These issues somehow keep my life in orbit and give a good understanding on how routing works over the Internet.

And finally academic session over. Done with all vivas and related stuff. Next will be exams likely in June. Time for me to get ready for travel. :)   Anyways an interesting topic for today’s post - Google Public DNS. Lot of us are familier with popular (and free) DNS resolvers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I have covered reason in previous posts on why it tends to fail with Content Delivery networks like Akamai which rely on anycasting at bottom DNS layer and simple unicasting on application servers. Anycasted DNS nodes point to application servers based on various factors like distance, load, cost etc out of interesting algorithms these CDN networks use for load & cost management.   Anyways today’s post focus is not CDN issues with these resolvers but Google Public DNS itself. Are these servers located in India and everywhere else where Google has PoPs?   Let’s do a simple trace to get forward path from Airtel to Google’s 8.8.8.8:

And an interesting day full of bit frustrating drama. Today was “External viva” for Major Project at college. It went good with external teacher but “internal ones” tend to cause un-necessary issues. Quite a few people put personal egos and frustration on top priority to an extent that they violate their own points for which they are arguing. They go completely unethical in way they deal with world.

I am saying this with full responsibility for couple of teachers from my college who have completely lost some “fundamentals of life” as taught in childhood to most of us. Some key principles like staying cool & calm, being humble, making best possible use of time and just being good with everyone. In last 4 years they haven’t learn how to give respect & talk with sense and they expect students to be learning “technology” from them? What an absurd!

Interesting days as always. Recently I was handed over “Alumni form” from college. 
Mixed feelings. This brings me to conclusion that I somewhat missed college life but anyways that’s small price I paid for my high obsession with some long term ideas. (ok may be that explains why I don’t have a Facebook account? Stop asking me about it!)

Hard to come to any conclusion at this stage. 

Anyways post for today…

Last night I was looking at routing tables and saw a interesting case where for a specific route.

Here’s what I got from Tata’s AS6453 looking glass:

Router: gin-ldn-core4  
Site: UK, London, LDN  
Command: show ip bgp 117.219.227.229

BGP routing table entry for 117.219.224.0/20  
Bestpath Modifiers: deterministic-med  
Paths: (4 available, best #4)  
Multipath: eBGP  
17 18 19

33765 1299 3549 9829, (received-only)  
ix-3-1-2.core4.LDN-London. from ix-3-1-2.core4.LDN-London. (ix-3-1-2.core4.LDN-London.)  
Origin IGP, valid, external

4755 9829  
mlv-tcore2. (metric 3605) from l78-tcore2. (66.110.10.234)  
Origin IGP, valid, internal  
Community:  
Originator: 66.110.10.215

4755 9829  
mlv-tcore2. (metric 3605) from l78-tcore1. (66.110.10.237)  
Origin IGP, valid, internal  
Community:  
Originator: 66.110.10.215

4755 9829  
mlv-tcore2. (metric 3605) from ldn-mcore3. (ldn-mcore3.)  
Origin IGP, valid, internal, best  
Community:  
Originator: 66.110.10.215

The first route in table seems pretty weird. AS path is 33765 1299 3549 9829 i.e clearly AS33765 sitting in middle of AS6453 and AS1299. This must be a route leak since Tata AS6453 and Telia AS1299 are way too bigger then Tanzania telecom and hence there’s no possibility of Tata transitting via Tanzania telecom. Though issue seems for just one specific route for BSNL which Tanzania telecom is learning from Telia, which further is getting from Global Crossing AS3549 (one of upstreams of BSNL).