SMW4 Cable outage

Today a friend from Pakistan informed about SMW4 outage. He reported about issues in Pakistan.

It seems like SMW4 is damaged near Egypt and that is what causing high load on East Asian routes giving pretty high latency.

I am at my home and sitting BSNL’s network and latency with Europe has jumped terribly to 700-800ms. Right now I do not see a direct route to Europe and it’s rather taking East Asia > US > Europe routes right now on other cable networks.

BSNL routing tables and upstreams

Just was looking at routing tables of BSNL. They have a significant address space in /10 - 117.192.0.0/10. Overall this /10 address space is divided into /18 and /20 subnets.

Let’s pick two of such subnets and observe routing tables from route-views:

  1. 117.192.0.0/18
  2. 117.192.0.0/20 

Routing table for 117.192.0.0/18

* 117.192.0.0/18 193.0.0.56 0 3333 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 194.85.102.33 0 3277 3216 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 194.85.40.15 0 3267 174 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 129.250.0.11 6 0 2914 6453 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 128.223.253.10 0 3582 3701 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 4.69.184.193 0 0 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 209.124.176.223 0 101 101 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 69.31.111.244 3 0 4436 2914 6453 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 207.46.32.34 0 8075 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 66.59.190.221 0 6539 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 12.0.1.63 0 7018 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 208.74.64.40 0 19214 2828 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 203.181.248.168 0 7660 2516 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 66.185.128.48 111 0 1668 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 134.222.87.1 0 286 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 157.130.10.233 0 701 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 114.31.199.1 0 0 4826 6939 1299 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 89.149.178.10 10 0 3257 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 154.11.98.225 0 0 852 3561 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 202.249.2.86 0 7500 2497 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 154.11.11.113 0 0 852 3561 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 144.228.241.130 0 1239 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 217.75.96.60 0 0 16150 1299 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 207.172.6.20 0 0 6079 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 206.24.210.102 0 3561 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 195.66.232.239 0 5459 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 208.51.134.254 2523 0 3549 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 207.172.6.1 0 0 6079 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 216.218.252.164 0 6939 1299 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 203.62.252.186 0 1221 4637 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
*> 66.110.0.86 0 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 164.128.32.11 0 3303 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 202.232.0.2 0 2497 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i

Routing table for 117.192.0.0/20:

BSNL routing messup at NIXI Delhi

Finally back in village location.

Was just looking around and saw BSNL having really crazy routing. I looked around and saw this:

NIXI Looking Glass - show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.15 routes

Router: NIXI Delhi (Noida)

Command: show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.15 routes

Total number of prefixes 0

Clearly BSNL is NOT announcing any prefix at NIXI Delhi at all. Thus if one has to send packets to BSNL in North area either it will be via transit (Tata/VSNL) or via any other peering NIXI exchange in Mumbai or Chennai.

MENOG 12 - Dubai

Landed in Dubai today evening for MENOG 12. Interesting to see this part of world. 

Agenda for tomorrow here

Airtel hijacking NXDOMAIN queries

Back in India after amazing APRICOT 2013 at Singapore. It was nice to stay in East Asia for a while and look around. :)

Anyways, issue for today - I have been using Airtel DNS servers from quite sometime since BSNL has crappy DNS while Google gives issues with Akamai while OpenDNS doesn’t has any node in India yet.  

Today I noticed a NXDOMAIN redirection for a non-working domain and later investigated. It seems like Airtel is hijacking on NXDOMAIN queries now.

APRICOT 2013, Singapore

In Singapore for APRICOT 2013 from last couple of days.

Very interesting event and a beautiful country. If anyone of the readers of this blog are around - I would be happy to meet!

Google Public DNS and Akamai issues in India

A quick blog post on a interesting issue coming up due to combined problem of CDN failure on Google Public DNS and bad Akamai performance due to Tata-NTT peering issue.

I was trying Zembra mail since there’s no more free Google Apps edition and one of my friend asked me to basic email on his domain up. It was more or less a straight task by installing Zembra with decent GUI.

Analysis: Inconsistent latency between two end points

An interesting evening here in village. From today sessional tests started at college and so does my blog posts too (to keep myself with positive energy!) ;)

 

Learned something new while troubleshooting. :)

I am used to getting latency of ~350ms with my server in Europe as I have mentioned in my past blog posts.

My connection > Server goes direct but return path goes via US and this is what increases latency. Today all of sudden I saw latency of 200ms with my server. 150ms less - that’s significant.

Dumb script for Picasaweb backup on Linux server & Amazon S3

Just wrote a quick script to pull dump of Picasaweb albums backup on my server & further to Amazon S3. Overall I have good trust on Google for data but it’s always a poor idea to leave all eggs in single bucket.

OK here’s the script (poorly written code. Literally spent 10mins on this, thus suggestions to improve my coding are more then welcome!)

 #!/bin/bash

Destination=<PUT YOUR DESTINATION HERE!>
google picasa list-albums | cut -d"," -f1 » $Destination/tmp/album_list.txt

cat $Destination/tmp/album_list.txt | while read album

do
          google picasa get “$album” $Destination/tmp
done

FileName=PicsBackup-`date ‘+%d-%B-%Y’`.tar
tar -cpzf $Destination/$FileName $Destination/tmp
gpg –output $Destination/$FileName.pgp -r –always-trust –encrypt $Destination/$FileName
s3cmd put $Destination/$FileName.pgp s3://YOUR-AWS-S3-BUCKET-ADDRESS-HERE

rm -r $Destination/tmp/*
rm $Destination/$FileName
rm $Destination/$FileName.pgp

How to use

Simply download Google Cli scripts, and get your Google account working with the installed stack. Also if you need Amazon S3 backup support then install & configure s3cmd. Once you have both of these configured with your account, simple give executable bit to the script & run!

Google's routing issues because of an Indonesian ISP

Yesterday it was reported across networking community that Google’s prefixes were having issue due to an Indonesian ISP Moratel AS23947.


Quick analysis

From data logged by routeviews it seems like it wasn’t exactly a prefix hijack. AS23947 did not originated prefixes but rather had a route leak leading to path leak of AS23947 > AS15169

Here’s a view of global routing table for Google’s prefix 216.239.32.0/24 at 15:57 GMT on 4th Nov: