Seems like NPIX traffic has started hitting 1Gbps levels and that is just so amazing. Came across this post by Niranjan.

NPIX or Nepal Internet Exchange is located in Kathmandu and operates out of its own datacenter. There’s a huge amount of (overhead) dark fibre availability in Kathmandu and as of the writing of this post I see 30 members at NPIX. 1Gbps might seem low from Western IX’es standards but that’s a quite good amount of traffic for an IX in South Asian region. If you see the member list there are just smaller ISPs and not many content players over there. Comparing numbers by NIXI traffic,

I recently came across an excellent draft at IETF by Job Snijders & friends. This is to address scenarios where a network might miss communication about a maintenance activity when BGP shutdown happens. Once implemented, this can potentially offer to send peer a message with up to 128 bytes with info about shutdown like “Ticket XXX: We are upgrading the router, will be back live in 1hr” etc.

It depends by appending such data to the sys notification which is part of BGP protocol. This is one which sends a message just before the shutdown of the session. So it similar to the way you see session tearing down due to prefix limits etc. This has already been implemented in some of the open source routing implementations like OpenBGPd, GoBGP, PMacct, Exabgp etc.   Here is the latest draft of this change.

Today I was having a chat with my friend Hari Haran. He mentioned that Facebook has started its PoP in Mumbai. This seems true and Facebook has mentioned GPX Mumbai as their private peering PoP in their peeringdb record.

I triggered a quick test trace to “www.facebook.com” on IPv4 from all Indian RIPE Atlas probes and resolved “www.facebook.com” on the probe itself. The lowest latency is from Airtel Karnataka and that’s still hitting Facebook in Singapore. I do not see any of networks with probe coverage hitting Facebook node locally.

On weekend  I was looking at BGP Instability Report data. As usual (and unfortunately) BSNL tops that list. BSNL is the most unstable autonomous network in the world. In past, I have written previously about how AS9829 is the rotten IP backbone.

This isn’t a surprise since they keep on coming on top but I think it’s well worth a check on what exactly is causing that. So I looked into BGP tables updates published on Oregon route-views from 21st May to 27th May and pulled data specifically for AS9829. I see zero withdrawals which are very interesting. I thought there would be a lot of announcements & withdrawals as they switch transits to balance traffic. If I plot the data, I get following chart of withdrawals against timestamp. This consists of summarised view of every 15mins and taken from 653 routing update dumps. It seems not feasible to graph data for 653 dumps, so I picked top 300.

Update - 12 July 2022

While migrating this old post from Wordpress to Hugo I realise that many of old external linked images are not available at source anymore and that breaks many of the external photos references on the blog.

In my previous post, I shared how I am running redundant uplinks at home (in non-BGP based setup) with the primary link on RF and secondary on DOCSIS. One of my good friends asked me the reason for the sudden jump in DOCSIS-based players across India, especially in smaller cities.

I posted about the home network in multiple other posts in past. I recent time I switched from Microtik SXT Lite 5 to Power Beam PBE-M5-400. This gave me a jump from 16dbi to 25dbi which gives much sharper beam. I also got a harness & climbed BTS myself (after getting permission from the manager) this time to switch gear. I think I can do a better job than wasting time in finding guys from local WISPs to do it. :)   Also, Essel Group launched Siti broadband in my home area and they are using DOCSIS. The network is overall fine though initially faced many outages due to fibre cuts here & there. As of now, the connection is reasonably stable. I am paying 860Rs/month ~ $14 for 10Mbps uncapped link which gives me 10Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up. From a price point, it’s an excellent connection to have for redundancy reasons. Now as the connection is stable enough to explore auto-failover. For last few months I took both primary links as well as backup links to the router in the form of tagged VLANs and used to push specific traffic based on source IP (device at home) or destination IP/port combination using policy based routing.  

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

dig version.bind ch txt @f.root-servers.net pic.twitter.com/YLW7hqt170

— Tony Finch (@fanf) April 3, 2017

 

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.

A while back I posted about routing filter generation via bgpq3 for Cisco (ios and XR) and Juniper JunOS based routers. I have received a number of emails in last few months about automated filter generation for Mikrotik routeros. Since Mikrotik’s CCRs are getting quite popular across small to mid-sized ISPs. So this blog post is about ways for generating filter config for a given ASN via IRR. One can use such logic with some kind of remote login mechanism like rancid (look for mtlogin here). I tried building around bgpq3 but it seems more easy with another popular tool in the domain called IRR Power Tools. Once IRR Power Tools (IRRPT) is setup, it allows us to fetch prefixes based via Internet Routing Registries and also aggregates them.   So, for instance, let’s pick AS54456:

India has a slum problem as many of us know. Slums are a serious problem and there’s just no easy way to fix them. One cannot just push thousands and thousands of people out while at the same time quality of life in slums is terrible. One thing which happens a lot in India is the fact that Govt. does nothing when slums are getting established and once they are established situation gets out of control.    

Earlier this month I got an opportunity to be part of IXP workshop in Kolkata. It was a 3-day event organised by ISOC Kolkata and supported by APNIC. There was also a workshop on DNSSEC and Champika Wijayatunga (from ICANN) was the instructor along with Anand Raje. It was a nice event and I come to know of other interesting projects ISOC Kolkata is doing like Indian IETF capacity building program apart from the IXP they are running in Kolkata. Mr Anupam Aggarwal and Anand showed the IX and it looks very good. I think it’s the first and only IX I know in India which is a real IX with proper policy. It’s an IX by a non-for-profit group, allows anyone to connect, a real layer 2 IX and welcomes anyone including ISPs, content players and root DNS servers. Presently IIFON-IX in Kolkata has few member ISPs besides the L root from ICANN and one of Verisign gTLD nodes (which host zones for .com, .net etc). I also saw a rack with some of Akamai CDN servers. This brings decent content right there. IX’es play an extremely important part of current internet infrastructure ecosystem. It’s very likely that content of this blog is travelling from my server to your browser from an Internet Exchange. :)