Super dull time here. No classes going on due to “TCS Placement session” at college and this makes me to sit in my room most of time of my day. Yesterday I tested connectivity to all 13 Global Root DNS Servers and found i root was giving issue. Here’s a my yesterday’s traceroute to i root: traceroute to i.root-servers.net. (192.36.148.17), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 router.local (10.0.0.1) 1.470 ms 1.

Time for a quick followup blog post. On 26th April of this year I blogged about broken connectivity of F root server which was hosted in NIXI Chennai. Apart from that blog post, I did informed ISC which operates F root (NIXI was host on behalf of them in India). In my open email on APNIC mailing list, I got a reply from Network Operations Center of ISC that they will verify and will take necessary action.

NIXI i.e National Internet Exchange of India is well known for it’s inefficiency and for its bad policies. I am posting this blog post to discuss some of them. Bit of background: NIXI is one (and only) Indian IXP i.e Internet Exchange Point established in 2003 so as to facilitate peering between Indian ISPs. Before this, there were lot of cases when Indian ISP’s were connecting to each other from outside India in Singapore and Europe.

Yesterday I spent sometime in answering questions on Google Apps forum. I really love this forum as I used to post a lot there. These days I don’t get much time for forum involvement. Anyways, yesterday I came across very interesting post from a user named Sandip. He got an error from Google’s DNS checking in the Google Apps Toolbox. Error: Presence of mail server on A record of your domain can lead to subtle and hard-to-debug problems with mails ‘accidentally’ missing in case of DNS problems.

I was just working (and playing music!) and realized that “Movie player” package given on default Ubuntu installation isn’t of much use. Decided to uninstall it, next needed arping for some test and installed it (via default debian repository). Something crazy happened here. I opened something on personal server and it gave DNS error. I shot couple of digs from terminal and all timed it. I was scared to hell thinking of DNS failure on personal domain which is very very unlikely since I am using multiple DNS providers and close to a dozen of servers serving DNS zone.