Migration to Hugo I have migrated this 14-year-old blog from a dynamic WordPress (based on WordPress) to a static website (based on Hugo). It was a pretty lengthy process even when I had scripts converting the WordPress XML export into markdown files. Why a static site? This gives a few advantages like: Must faster rendering as all the pages are generated well in advance & pushed to the server Better security (as the backend is not at all exposed unlike WordPress where backend admin portal was visible & behind an authenticated URL) Easy to distribute and put behind CDN Easy to type posts as now it’s just markdown I haven’t finalised the hosting location for this newer site.

I was having this discussion with someone recently on possible software to manage an IXP. Lately, IXP Manager has become the de-facto choice for managing IX. It’s a good tool. Nick and INEX team has built a fantastic open-source tool. But I still feel it’s a bit overloaded for a small 1-2 DC IX operation. If I have to set up a small to mid-size IX, I would rather do that with arouteserver instead of IXP Manager as I did in case of BharatIX in Mumbai (until it shutdown!

Next week SANOG (South Asia Network Operator Group) event will start in Kathmandu, Nepal. I will be instructing on a 4-day workshop on Network Automation with two fellow instructors. The idea of this workshop is to make fellow Ops / Network engineers familiar with concepts of Docker, Ansible, and Gitlab CI/CD pipeline and ultimately to make use of REST APIs to bind these all together. This is the first time I am doing such a workshop and the content here is built from scratch.

As returning readers of this blog would be aware - I found a trick to find Facebook caching servers around the world during the APRICOT 2018 hackathon. Since then I am running my code again every year to see the changes and publish this report. Previous reports March 2018 here Nov 2019 here April 2021 here Facebook knows! Back in 2019, I was in San Francisco, California for NANOG 75. While roaming around in the lobby, someone read the NANOG card hanging around my neck and greeted me.

In a recent Network AF podcast Avi Freedman (Kentik) joked with the guest about how he finds who is transit free / tier 1 network. He said, “I ask everyone who they think is a tier 1 network. Everyone includes their own name + other names”. Next, he ignores the self-nomination & looks at the common list to find who actually is a tier 1 network. This is funny, intuitive and gives some clue.