Today I met a good friend and he has recently moved back into Rohtak (like me!) and was crying over BSNL’s issues. He has issues of unstable DSL due to last mile and I told him that even if last mile works well, BSNL still has got ton of issues with their IP backbone traffic.   It’s Sunday late night out here in India and I am having really pathetic connectivity with just everywhere except Google. With Google only key difference I noted is that my TCP session to Google’s services is terminating at Mumbai and not Delhi anymore. First and formost, I did trace to spectranet.in (which is last company I was working for) to see how is my latency with server hosting it:

BCP38 - also known as “Network Ingress Filtering” is concept where we filter incoming packets from end customers and allow packets ONLY from IP’s assigned to them.   Before going to BCP38, let’s first understand how packets forwarding work:

Here User 1 is connected to User 2 via a series of router R1, R2 and R3. Here R1 and R3 are ISP’s edge routers while R2 is a core router. In typical way the network is setup, entire effort is given on logic of routing table i.e for packets to reach from User 1 to User 2, we need to ensure that User 1 has default route towards R1, knows that User-2’s IP is behind R3 which is reachable via R2. So path User 1 > R1 > R2 > R3 > User 2 comes up. And same for User 2 > R3 > R2 > R1 > User 1 as return path. Now e.g IP pool for User-1 is 192.168.1.0/24 and is using 192.168.1.2 out of it while IP pool for User-2 is 192.168.2.0/24 and is using 192.168.2.2 out of it.  

Just finished with SANOG 26 conference and tutorials. It went very nice. Interestingly this time conference did not start early morning like it did in SANOG 24 at Noida. It was rather late in afternoon. Also, on very good note - there were less Govt. bureaucrats to bore attendees with usual stuff they always talk about but have very little idea. One specific interesting presentation was  Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless in India by Prof Abhay Karandikar (from IIT Mumbai). In start I felt it to be usual crappy 5G talk but later realized it was much more interesting. I loved the idea “Have 2Mbps everywhere static broadband and not some absurd number on mobile wireless broadband as we hear in case of 3G/4G. Although 2Mbps now is much slower and I would rather suggest that we target for 10Mbps everywhere (something which can be supported by copper/coax/fiber hybrid) but anyways it was nice refreshing talk. His thoughts were interesting but mostly impractical since had high dependence on useless project like NOFN. For the next part, we had a nice theme of keeping network simple which everyone kind of liked. Simplicity in Network Design & Deployments by Dany Pinto (from Colt) and Unified Forwarding with Segment Routing by Mohan Nanduri (from Microsoft Azure Cloud WAN team) were part of that. Santanu Dasgupta gave a presentation about Challenges of L2NID based Metro-E Architecture for vCPE/NFV Deployments and kind of confused everyone. :P

One of very cool features of IPv6 is link-local address which stays local to a given link. For this fe80::/10 is reserved. A /10 is a huge amount of address space in IPv6 (and in IPv4 too :) ). This means from fe80:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 to febf:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff.

Since by design link-local address stays local, the address configured on the upstream/gateway router can be kept same for ease of use and comfort. This wasn’t the case of IPv4 where each VLAN/layer 2 domain had it’s own gateway.   So e.g if you have two VLANs or interfaces say: Gi1/0 and Gi2/0. You decide to use 10.100.100.0/30 on Gi1/0 and 10.100.100.4/30 on Gi2/0.

Out in Mumbai to attend SANOG 26.

Meet and greet if you are attending as well or around in Mumbai. :)

Came across this excellent presentation of Peter Hoose (Facebook). It gives a very good logical way of troubleshooting problems. Less about actual problems but about how Ops members companies like Facebook troubleshoot them.

This is from NANOG 64. Enjoy the presentation. :)

Few days back a friend of mine (who works for an ISP) congratulated me for joining HE. Along with wishes he told me that our bgp.he.net doesn’t works well and the reason he fealt so is because he couldn’t see all peers for his ASN in our tool.

This is not a problem and to be more broader - same applies on all popular tools other then bgp.he.net like RIPE Stats, Robtex AS analysis etc. The reason many of these tools do not and cannot show all peers is because they show what they see from the point of collection. E.g right now I am on BSNL (AS9829).

Just saw this excellent TED talk. Very inspiring. Points out many key problem in our way we (as Indians) work.  

Enjoy!

Some updates from personal life…

I have joined Fremont based IP backbone & colocation provider - Hurricane Electric and would be working on some cool things at AS6939. :)  

Updates on blog…

I have changed theme and entire look of blog and re-designed it with new plugins, more tweaking etc. As of now blog has more cleaner while theme which gives more space for posting, improved security with some ACLs, forced HTTPS to avoid telcos from injecting iframe in readers on 3G networks (which is very bad and worrying). Also, with use of bunch of plugins, now my I am hosting all static media content on AWS S3 to avoid local storage on server, it’s backup etc. Running it on AWS S3 with Geo replication + Cloudfront for CDN/efficient delivery made much more sense. Though sad that there’s no easy way for integration of Google Cloud storage with wordpress. S3 being more mature product makes it easier.

On one of key updates from my life - I have decided to exit from Spectranet AS10029. Overall it was fun working at Spectranet but the same time it was very different experience. I loved most of time I spent here and it was great learning experience.

Back on work to finish off my notice period!  

no router bgp 10029
delete local-as 10029