Yesterday I came across a very interesting case of network hijacking of an ISP from wrong BGP announcements by another network. This issue was reported to NANOG mailing list. Issue was reported by Kevin, Senior Engineer at Altus Communications (AS11325). Problem was that SBJ Media LLC (AS33611) was making a /24 block announcement for specific slices of Altus - 208.110.48.0/20, 63.246.112.0/20, and 68.66.112.0/20 which are allocated to Altus Communications (as per ARIN whois).

Sify is one of really interesting companies. One time pioneer of Indian internet market via chain of cyber cafes. Good old days. Present situation of Sify in consumer market is not significant. Latest earing figures clearly state company is moving towards enterprise segment. Company is quite aggressive in enterprise segment offerings specially datacenters & corporate leased lines. Is consumer market really over for Sify or there’s still some hope? Well, consumer broadband market isn’t really over!

Interestingly routing issues didn’t spare one of top CDN provider - Akamai! So what’s wrong? (from my BSNL connection): PING akamai.com (61.213.189.49) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=1 ttl=52 time=492 ms 64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=2 ttl=52 time=492 ms 64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=3 ttl=52 time=474 ms 64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=4 ttl=51 time=492 ms 64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=5 ttl=51 time=489 ms \--- akamai.com ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 22236ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 474.

This is a very popular mistake admins make - it’s missing . i.e dot in the end of hostname. This causes serious problems (and lot of frustration!). E.g taking example of popular Google’s cname record ghs.google.com. As we know if one would like to use mail.domain.com., he has to point the CNAME record to “ghs.google.com”. Now here if one misses dot in the end of ghs.google.com. - it will give a real value like:

Seems like k-root servers are having issue again. This is not the first time BSNL is having such issues. Last year I reported issue with K root server (which was actually because of downtime at Delhi node). Here’s some data for today’s case: PING 193.0.14.129 (193.0.14.129) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 193.0.14.129: icmp_req=1 ttl=44 time=309 ms 64 bytes from 193.0.14.129: icmp_req=2 ttl=44 time=312 ms 64 bytes from 193.0.14.129: icmp_req=3 ttl=44 time=312 ms 64 bytes from 193.