Category Archives: Networking

22 Sep

RIPE Atlas India coverage and some thoughts

It has been some time since I started pushing Indian community for hosting RIPE Atlas Probes. These probes are small devices designed to be hosted at end user’s connection and do pre-defined as well as user-defined measurement. Measurement includes ping, trace, DNS lookup, SSL check etc.

Currently, there are 61 active RIPE Atlas probes. I would say it has +/- of 7-8 probes which go offline and come back online when I request hosts to check.

 

 

Map of probes in India

 

I think now we about to reach a scenario where we should focus more around probes in specific regions and specific networks. Metro cities have some probes but outside are pretty much missing. Plus almost no probe in central India. In terms of ASN coverage, we can look at Hurricane Electric’s country report for top ASNs list – https://bgp.he.net/country/IN

 

Following top ASNs IP network are missing from coverage of probe network:

  1. Reliance Communications  – AS18101
  2. Vodafone India – AS55410
  3. Sify – AS9583 (I recently shipped probes to them and expecting few to go online soon)
  4. TTSL – AS45820
  5. IDEA Cellular – AS55644
  6. Aircel – AS10201
  7. Syscon Infoway – AS45194
  8. CtrlS datacenter – AS18229
  9. Ishan’s Network – AS45117
  10. Railtel Corp – AS24186

 

In case you work for any of these networks or are a customer of these networks, please consider hosting RIPE Atlas probe. You can fill the form given below and I will send you a probe on priority.

06 Jul

ISC F root server – IPv6 issue at NIXI Chennai

Last week I noticed that F root was showing poor connectivity with Indian RIPE Atlas probes for F-root. The graph looked really terrible.

 

 

 

I traced to it from one of RIPE Atlas probes and saw this trace:

 

Here the last hop before timeout i.e hop 6 is of NIXI Chennai peering subnet 2001:de8:1:2::/64. As soon as I saw it, it reminded me older issue which happened and broke IPv4 connectivity to root DNS servers. I blogged about it here, here and here. So the problem remains that NIXI is broken cost wise due to charge on in – out policy. This leads to people accepting routes at all NIXI’s but they do not announce their routes. Thus return path is broken and essentially traffic is being blackholed. Earlier this issue was fixed by adding IP transit support to these root DNS servers so that a default route stays in case of all other failures.

It seems like same is missing in IPv4 world and routes are not being announced.

During this time, I saw two BGP sessions at NIXI Chennai for F root:

2001:de8:1:2::3 24049 ESTAB 25d 3h10m 1 0 2263 0
2001:de8:1:2::4 24049 ESTAB 125d18h30m 1 0 2264 0

 

Both were announcing prefix covering F root server’s pool:

 

I posted about it on SANOG and APNIC mailing list. Though there hasn’t been any reply by ISC, Sunny from APNIC passed info to them and I noticed that prefix announcement from NIXI has been withdrawn. Connectivity to F root now works to the instances outside India.

 

 

 

Waiting to hear from ISC as of now. Time to get back to work!