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

Just was looking around at EDNS support by Google. To find how it supports and how packet looks like I created a test NS records for dnstest.anuragbhatia.com pointing to one of test server (178.238.225.247). I wasn’t running any DNS server on the server. Just ran quick tcpdump.  

At server end:

sudo tcpdump 'port 53 and dst 178.238.225.247' -nn -vvv -w sample.pcap

Then I forcefully triggered DNS queries via Google’s recursor using:**

Came across excellent tool called “bgpq3” from one of recent posts in NANOG mailing list. This tool can general filters for a given ASN for Cisco or Juniper based on RADB’s data.

E.g Juniper style config for AS54456 (1st ASN on which I worked on!) :)

anurag@server7 ~> bgpq3 -Jl Cloudaccess as54456 
policy-options {
replace:
 prefix-list Cloudaccess {
    199.116.76.0/24;
    199.116.77.0/24;
    199.116.78.0/24;
    199.116.79.0/24;
 }
}
anurag@server7 ~> 

Cisco style config:

> anurag@server7:~$ bgpq3 -l Cloudaccess as54456 
no ip prefix-list Cloudaccess 
ip prefix-list Cloudaccess permit 199.116.76.0/24 
ip prefix-list Cloudaccess permit 199.116.77.0/24
ip prefix-list Cloudaccess permit 199.116.78.0/24
ip prefix-list Cloudaccess permit 199.116.79.0/24 
anurag@server7:~$

Cisco XR style config:

Few months ago I moved away from Google Chrome to Opera Mobile on my Android device. Google Chrome is pretty loaded and overall slow.   Recently I noticed browsing was pretty slow. I noticed that “Off-Road mode” was enabled.  

I disabled it and performance was much better. I did heard of it in past and clearly it’s a proxy mode where packets between Opera instance running on cell phone and destination server are routed via an Opera server which uses some special compression technologies and helps in making browsing faster. Carrying with my obsession for looking at ASNs and IP address, I enabled it again and visited bgp.he.net and was surprised to see the result.

I have been to quite a few countries but I must say Japan just stands out in internet connectivity. Overall connectivity is just amazing out here. As I landed on airport in Fukuoka, I noticed open free wifi (just one signup online form to accept TOS and it was up), later I noticed Fukuoka City Wifi project and it’s really visible across streets and very much works. As

I got to hotel, I was given SSID for wifi and it was just up! No crazy proxy, no crazy use of hotel room numbers/last name combinations. I was getting 20Mbps speed on wifi. This was a clear sign that transit was not bottleneck and likely wifi/end point connectivity was the one which was putting it on to 20Mbps (802.11n on a good quality router with 5Ghz). As I connected my laptop on wired LAN, I noticed (which I did expected by now) - connection synced at 100Mbps LAN and that was pretty much internet speed I was getting.

Just thought to put a quick blog post. Right now I am sitting at Shanghai airport (China) and looking at local Internet routing table of this region. As well know - routing between India & China very much sucks and most of packets go via US.

Here’s a trace from China to India to one of servers I manage:

Anurags-MacBook-Pro:~ anurag$ mtr -wrc 1 lamp1
HOST: Anurags-MacBook-Pro.local Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1.|– 172.21.183.254 0.0% 1 1.7 1.7 1.7 1.7 0.0
2.|– 192.168.88.2 0.0% 1 4.2 4.2 4.2 4.2 0.0
3.|– 180.168.176.97 0.0% 1 3.4 3.4 3.4 3.4 0.0
4.|– 124.74.100.181 0.0% 1 3.4 3.4 3.4 3.4 0.0
5.|– 218.1.2.69 0.0% 1 7.4 7.4 7.4 7.4 0.0
6.|– 124.74.215.65 0.0% 1 4.2 4.2 4.2 4.2 0.0
7.|– 61.152.86.198 0.0% 1 7.4 7.4 7.4 7.4 0.0
8.|– ??? 100.0 1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
9.|– 202.97.35.26 0.0% 1 8.5 8.5 8.5 8.5 0.0
10.|– 202.97.52.30 0.0% 1 226.8 226.8 226.8 226.8 0.0
11.|– ldngw1.arcor-ip.net 0.0% 1 209.2 209.2 209.2 209.2 0.0
12.|– 145.253.33.238 0.0% 1 208.8 208.8 208.8 208.8 0.0
13.|– ??? 100.0 1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
14.|– 182.19.15.1 0.0% 1 358.9 358.9 358.9 358.9 0.0
15.|– 203.122.61.148.reverse.spectranet.in 0.0% 1 362.1 362.1 362.1 362.1 0.0
16.|– ??? 100.0 1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
17.|– 203.92.40.206.reverse.spectranet.in 0.0% 1 378.6 378.6 378.6 378.6 0.0
Anurags-MacBook-Pro:~ anurag$

And return path (India > China)

Like last three APRICOTs, I would be attending APRICOT 2015 this time. It’s in Japan and it would be fun as always to meet networking community. :)

Buzz me if any of readers here are attending. Would be great to meet & greet!

It has been very interesting as well as very busy times in life. There have been lot of developments at my job end where I am spending almost 14-15hrs a day but at the same time I think I should start blog posting again.  

Starting with a non-technical topic this time…

Why incompetent leaders are dangerous?

A close friend asked me sometime back and I happen to have interesting experiences with those “incompetent leaders”. The context of this question was that my good friend was offered a job in a good company, good salary, interesting work but under a highly incompetent leader. So should he proceed for it or not? My reply to him was immediate no, while my other friends (since it was group discussion) were in favor of it considering it.