I have been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for the last few days. This is my first travel to Mongolia and this far up in the North (except for previous travel to Russia in 2016 and some parts of Nordic areas in Europe). Geographically Mongolia is located between Russia (on the North side) and China (on the South side). I am here for mnNOG 5 event. mnNOG is the Mongolian Network Operators Group.

APNIC 56 is happening next month in Kyoto, Japan. This would be my third-time travel to Japan and besides meeting network operators around the region at the event, I will be doing a one-day tutorial on Network automation with Christoff Visser from IIJ research labs and Abdul Awal from APNIC. The agenda is similar to (though a subset) of network automation workshops I have done over the last few months across different events.

For a while, I have been looking for a smokeping alternative for latency monitoring from different servers spread around. While smokeping has survived well over time, in 2023 it feels like an outdated package, with limited options, lacks federation etc. This post from Karan Sharma / Zerodha on “Monitoring my home network” was exciting. His setup included a telegraph agent on a local server, Prometheus to scrap data and Grafana to draw latency data.

Earlier in March I visited Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The trip was purely personal as my wife happened to have been born there. These are Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal located in the South East of West Bengal and geographically quite near Myanmar and Thailand. The nearest large Indian cities on the mainland are Kolkata and Chennai. In the initial part of the trip, we stayed in Swaraj Dweep (old name Havelock islands) and later in Port Blair.

Background I am running my own authoritative DNS servers for the last few years. In earlier stages I just used registrar-provided DNS, later moved to “Cloud provider” provided DNS and ultimately settled for running my own auth DNS. Two major requirements pushed me to self-host auth DNS: Requirement of REST API for DNS needed by the web servers to resolve Letsencrypt certbot DNS-based challenge. This allows me to have internally hosted tools with Letsencrypt issues TLS certificates instead of self-signed ones.