Category Archives: DNS

25 Oct

NIXI root DNS servers and updates

Has been a while since I checked the status of root servers which are hosted at NIXI. The list as per their official member list stays the same i.e i root in Mumbai, K root in Noida and F root in Chennai. 

i root seems to be up!

show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.75 received-routes
       There are 5 received routes from neighbor 218.100.48.75
Searching for matching routes, use ^C to quit...
Status A:AGGREGATE B:BEST b:NOT-INSTALLED-BEST C:CONFED_EBGP D:DAMPED
       E:EBGP H:HISTORY I:IBGP L:LOCAL M:MULTIPATH m:NOT-INSTALLED-MULTIPATH
       S:SUPPRESSED F:FILTERED s:STALE
       Prefix             Next Hop        MED        LocPrf     Weight Status
1      192.36.148.0/24    218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674 29216
2      194.58.198.0/24    218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674 56908
3      194.58.199.0/24    218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674 56908
4      194.146.106.0/24   218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674
5      194.146.107.0/24   218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674

K root seems to be down!

Router: NIXI Delhi (Noida)
Command: show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.6 received-routes
show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.6 received-routes
Inbound soft reconfiguration not enabled for neighbor 218.100.48.6

F root seems to be up!

show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.135 received-routes
       There are 1 received routes from neighbor 218.100.48.135
Searching for matching routes, use ^C to quit...
Status A:AGGREGATE B:BEST b:NOT-INSTALLED-BEST C:CONFED_EBGP D:DAMPED
       E:EBGP H:HISTORY I:IBGP L:LOCAL M:MULTIPATH m:NOT-INSTALLED-MULTIPATH
       S:SUPPRESSED F:FILTERED s:STALE
       Prefix             Next Hop        MED        LocPrf     Weight Status
1      192.5.5.0/24       218.100.48.135  10         100        0      ME
         AS_PATH: 24049 3557 3557

Atleast while 2 out of 3 root servers seems to be up but for some reason my connection in Haryana isn’t  hitting i root. F root instance it is taking me there for sure. 

i root latency check from my home: 

ping -c 5 i.root-servers.net.
PING i.root-servers.net (192.36.148.17) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from i.root-servers.net (192.36.148.17): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=156 ms
64 bytes from i.root-servers.net (192.36.148.17): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=155 ms
64 bytes from i.root-servers.net (192.36.148.17): icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=155 ms
64 bytes from i.root-servers.net (192.36.148.17): icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=156 ms
64 bytes from i.root-servers.net (192.36.148.17): icmp_seq=5 ttl=52 time=155 ms
--- i.root-servers.net ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 155.817/156.034/156.481/0.551 ms

That’s clearly too high latency. Latency from my location to Mumbai is typically 30-40ms. Let’s trace to the i root. 

traceroute i.root-servers.net.
traceroute to i.root-servers.net. (192.36.148.17), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  172.16.0.1 (172.16.0.1)  0.590 ms  0.664 ms  0.774 ms
 2  103.201.140.218 (103.201.140.218)  3.500 ms  3.413 ms  3.495 ms
 3  10.10.26.1 (10.10.26.1)  6.182 ms  6.304 ms  6.012 ms
 4  10.10.26.9 (10.10.26.9)  6.318 ms  6.047 ms  5.964 ms
 5  nsg-static-77.249.75.182-airtel.com (182.75.249.77)  45.636 ms  44.225 ms  44.144 ms
 6  182.79.191.89 (182.79.191.89)  56.411 ms 182.79.181.218 (182.79.181.218)  59.690 ms 182.79.153.86 (182.79.153.86)  66.090 ms
 7  182.79.149.95 (182.79.149.95)  207.319 ms 182.79.217.94 (182.79.217.94)  57.670 ms 182.79.149.95 (182.79.149.95)  207.285 ms
 8  182.79.177.101 (182.79.177.101)  187.845 ms 182.79.224.134 (182.79.224.134)  183.999 ms 182.79.224.124 (182.79.224.124)  180.657 ms
 9  182.79.146.218 (182.79.146.218)  211.258 ms 182.79.154.2 (182.79.154.2)  187.929 ms 182.79.154.10 (182.79.154.10)  192.907 ms
10  182.79.149.103 (182.79.149.103)  183.405 ms  181.645 ms  181.540 ms
11  peering.r1.lnx.dnsnode.net (195.66.225.151)  157.300 ms  157.214 ms  157.293 ms
12  i.root-servers.net (192.36.148.17)  157.364 ms  156.423 ms *

Thus Airtel is taking me to all the way to London (while LNX = Airport code for Smolensk Airport, Smolensk, Russia but route clearly shows it’s being exchanged at LINX. Someone in Netnod got into habit of writing LINX as LNX which is confussing). 

I see the same by querying id.server and hostname.bind in CHAOS class.

dig chaos @192.36.148.17 id.server txt  +short
"s1.lnx"
dig chaos @192.36.148.17 hostname.bind  txt  +short
"s1.lnx"

So, for now, Airtel is preferring route learnt via LINX peering over route learnt at NIXI. In a check by all Indian RIPE Atlas probes, I see that out of 50 RIPE Atlas probes, 23 are hitting s1.mum in Mumbai, 19 are hitting LINX London (s1.lnx) and 1 (which is hosted on NKN) is hitting s1.amx in Amsterdam (json data here). 

Why this happens? 

It’s often the lack of peering and/or case of prefered routes. For smaller networks, it’s simply missing peering. For larger networks, it’s about which route they prefer, which not. Here’s a view of networks with their ASNs sorted by latency (wherever RIPE Atlas Probe) was present (measurement link here). 

So what can be done about it? 

NIXI needs to be more attractive to various (smaller) networks which clearly it is not since it just does not has any content player connected to it due to policy issue. Furthermore customers of Airtel need to buzz it and request for a better route to i root’s local instance. 

Comments & thoughts expressed in the post are personal and have nothing to do with my employer. I am also volunteering for supporting tech platform for BharatIX to facilitate peering.

27 Apr

Cloudflare hosting F root server

A few days some folks in internet community noticed Cloudflare AS13335 announcing F root server’s routes covering prefix 192.5.5.0/24.
 


 
Above tweet shows that case is clearly not a mistake but rather some sort of arrangement between Cloudflare and ISC (which is responsible for F-root). There was another discussion on DNS-OARC mailing list here.
From our bgp.he.net tool, one can analyse route propagation for F root’s AS3557.

 
Here we can see that routes are visible from AS13335 to Telefonica AS13335. One can safely assume that AS12956 (considered to be a Tier1 / transit free network as per list here) is not a customer of Cloudflare. So the fact that still route is being announced to Telefonica gives an impression that AS3557 is downstream of Cloudflare.
It’s hard to say on the kind of arrangement as I still see many of instances of F-root are being hosted directly by ISC from hostname.bind query triggered via local RIPE Atlas probes in those regions. It could be that Cloudflare is hosting a part of this setup say in developing region where they have their caching PoPs. Yet to see a detailed blog post from Cloudflare about it. (I like their detailed blog!)
 
Update: 2nd April 2017 
Henry from Cloudflare pointed me to their official announcement blog post written after around 5 months of this post. You can find their official announcement here.