I am in Noumea in New Caledonia in the Pacific Islands. Next week we have APNIC 46 conference and I would be moderating an exciting panel discussion with friends from Akamai, Cloudflare, Facebook and more about working of CDNs.
If attending APNIC 46, please come & join this session.
If you are interested in connecting to Hurricane Electric (AS6939) in this region, please do drop me a message.
(List of our PoPs in the region here)
Earlier this year after APRICOT 2018, I posted a list of visible Facebook FNA (CDN caching) nodes across the world with IPv4, IPv6 and the AS name. I got quite a few mails in following months about people mentioning that they installed nodes but do not see their names in the list (and that was normal since list was static).
I re-ran my script to see emailslatest status of nodes. During last check I saw 1689 nodes (3rd March). Now on 26th Aug i.e after close to 6 months, the total number of nodes has increased to 2204.
For folks from the non-networking world, default route means basically a path to send packets when you do not have a specific route. So e.g if you know how to send packets to Google, send it, for Netflix, send it, for say Amazon - no path? Well, no worries, just send via a default path. So default route is basically what takes traffic for everything else.
Returning to the post which is not about networking. It’s about default route for home routing table and that’s my mother. :)
Often this comes into the subnetting discussion by my friends who are deploying IPv6 for the first time. How do you calculate subnets outside the 4-bit nibble boundary? This also happens to be one of starting points of APNIC IPv6 routing workshop where I occasionally instruct as community trainer.
In IPv6 context, it refers to 4 bit and any change in multiple of 4 bits is easy to calculate. Here’s how: Let’s say we have a allocation: 2001:db8::/32. Now taking slices from this pool within 4 bit boundry is quite easy. /36 slices (1 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/36 2001:db8:1000::/36 2001:db8:2000::/36 and so on… /40 slices (2 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/40 2001:db8:0100::/40 2001:db8:0200::/40 /44 slices (3 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/44 2001:db8:0010::/44 2001:db8:0020::/44 /48 slices (4 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/48 2001:db8:0001::/48 2001:db8:0002::/48 Clearly, it seems much simple and that is one of the reasons we often strongly recommend subnetting within the nibble boundary and not outside for all practical use cases. However understanding why it’s easy this way, as well as things like how to subnet outside nibble boundary for cases, say if you are running a very large network and have a /29 allocation from RIR.
Suddenly the voice market in India is becoming very interesting. Earlier it was the case of Jio (and competitors) launching unlimited voice plans and now it’s the case of Govt. of India permitting IP telephony. IP Telephony i.e networks where telephony happens over IP (not to be confused with IP to IP calls but) where IP to PSTN interconnects happen. Till a few months ago IP telephony (or IP-PSTN) interconnection was allowed only under certain conditions like doing it inside a building only for purpose of call centres (with OSP license) or running SIP trunks over private networks. Things like termination of calls originated from the apps was not allowed (where IP-PSTN was happening within India) as well as DID or Direct Inward Dialing numbers were not allowed. There were even cases where apps/businesses had to shut down due to confusing regulation. Here’s a nice article from Medianama about it. But all those were things of past. In May Wifi calling or calls via Wifi where wifi is used loosely and it’s essentially called via any sort of Internet connections were permitted (news here). Later after TRAI’s clarification it now has been formally allowed. While it may not look as attractive as it should have been in the age of WhatsApp calling (IP to IP, not PSTN mess involved!), it still is quite interesting and going to bring some major change.