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As mentioned in part 1 of this post, this part contains the map of GPON OLTs for BBNL network. You like to see part 2 of this post which has map of the fiber point of interconnects. 

 

BBNL OLT Map

As mentioned in part 1 of the post, this part contains the map of fibre point of interconnects for BBNL network. This is one of the interesting parts of the network and if executed well, it can be a really great middle mile. Though I haven’t seen any ground deployment as yet of the same. Will explore more in PoIs around my city.  

 

BBNL Fibre Point of Interconnect 

Has been a while since I checked the status of root servers which are hosted at NIXI. The list as per their official member list stays the same i.e i root in Mumbai, K root in Noida and F root in Chennai. 

 

i root seems to be up!

show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.75 received-routes
       There are 5 received routes from neighbor 218.100.48.75
Searching for matching routes, use ^C to quit...
Status A:AGGREGATE B:BEST b:NOT-INSTALLED-BEST C:CONFED_EBGP D:DAMPED
       E:EBGP H:HISTORY I:IBGP L:LOCAL M:MULTIPATH m:NOT-INSTALLED-MULTIPATH
       S:SUPPRESSED F:FILTERED s:STALE
       Prefix             Next Hop        MED        LocPrf     Weight Status
1      192.36.148.0/24    218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674 29216
2      194.58.198.0/24    218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674 56908
3      194.58.199.0/24    218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674 56908
4      194.146.106.0/24   218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674
5      194.146.107.0/24   218.100.48.75   0          100        0      BE
         AS_PATH: 8674

 

While I am spending time on APNIC’s security workshop here at APNIC 46, I got curious about DNSSEC deployment across ccTLDs. 

For those who may be unaware, DNSSEC adds signature the DNS responses making it possible to cryptographically verify a DNS query response. 

Out of 254 ccTLDs, 125 support DNSSEC with a published DS record (at least that is what I get when I check their zone) and 129 do not support it as yet. So, for now, it is at 49.21%. 

I am in Noumea in New Caledonia in the Pacific Islands. Next week we have APNIC 46 conference and I would be moderating an exciting panel discussion with friends from Akamai, Cloudflare, Facebook and more about working of CDNs. 

If attending APNIC 46, please come & join this session.

If you are interested in connecting to Hurricane Electric (AS6939) in this region, please do drop me a message.

(List of our PoPs in the region here)

Earlier this year after APRICOT 2018, I posted a list of visible Facebook FNA (CDN caching) nodes across the world with IPv4, IPv6 and the AS name. I got quite a few mails in following months about people mentioning that they installed nodes but do not see their names in the list (and that was normal since list was static). 

I re-ran my script to see emailslatest status of nodes. During last check I saw 1689  nodes (3rd March). Now on 26th Aug i.e after close to 6 months, the total number of nodes has increased to 2204.

For folks from the non-networking world, default route means basically a path to send packets when you do not have a specific route. So e.g if you know how to send packets to Google, send it, for Netflix, send it, for say Amazon - no path? Well, no worries, just send via a default path. So default route is basically what takes traffic for everything else.

Returning to the post which is not about networking. It’s about default route for home routing table and that’s my mother. :)

Often this comes into the subnetting discussion by my friends who are deploying IPv6 for the first time. How do you calculate subnets outside the 4-bit nibble boundary? This also happens to be one of starting points of APNIC IPv6 routing workshop where I occasionally instruct as community trainer.

 

So what is a Nibble boundary?

In IPv6 context, it refers to 4 bit and any change in multiple of 4 bits is easy to calculate. Here’s how: Let’s say we have a allocation: 2001:db8::/32. Now taking slices from this pool within 4 bit boundry is quite easy. /36 slices (1 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/36 2001:db8:1000::/36 2001:db8:2000::/36 and so on… /40 slices (2 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/40 2001:db8:0100::/40 2001:db8:0200::/40 /44 slices (3 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/44 2001:db8:0010::/44 2001:db8:0020::/44 /48 slices (4 x 4 bits) 2001:db8:0000::/48 2001:db8:0001::/48 2001:db8:0002::/48 Clearly, it seems much simple and that is one of the reasons we often strongly recommend subnetting within the nibble boundary and not outside for all practical use cases. However understanding why it’s easy this way, as well as things like how to subnet outside nibble boundary for cases, say if you are running a very large network and have a /29 allocation from RIR.

 

Suddenly the voice market in India is becoming very interesting. Earlier it was the case of Jio (and competitors) launching unlimited voice plans and now it’s the case of Govt. of India permitting IP telephony. IP Telephony i.e networks where telephony happens over IP (not to be confused with IP to IP calls but) where IP to PSTN interconnects happen. Till a few months ago IP telephony (or IP-PSTN) interconnection was allowed only under certain conditions like doing it inside a building only for purpose of call centres (with OSP license) or running SIP trunks over private networks. Things like termination of calls originated from the apps was not allowed (where IP-PSTN was happening within India) as well as DID or Direct Inward Dialing numbers were not allowed. There were even cases where apps/businesses had to shut down due to confusing regulation. Here’s a nice article from Medianama about it. But all those were things of past. In May Wifi calling or calls via Wifi where wifi is used loosely and it’s essentially called via any sort of Internet connections were permitted (news here). Later after TRAI’s clarification it now has been formally allowed. While it may not look as attractive as it should have been in the age of WhatsApp calling (IP to IP, not PSTN mess involved!), it still is quite interesting and going to bring some major change.  

Background

I got married a while back. My wife and I had a discussion and both were in favour that she changes her surname. This was also based on our discussion with my sister who suggested getting it done instead of keeping different surnames for us. As we were getting married certificate, we both were surprised to find that my wife’s surname cannot be simply updated on various IDs using just the marriage certificate. Instead one has to go through a process. Since I spent a bit of time on this before, here’s a quick blog post about how exactly it’s done in India. Warning: India specific post. Any International reader can just hang up right away! Plus if you are not in the process of name/surname change, this post would be useless for you anyways! :)   First and foremost, name update can happen only in IDs and not on any certificate document. Certificate work with old name + a notice published in The Gazette of India.  In terms of IDs, we had the following to update: author: “Anurag Bhatia” url: “/2018/05/misc/legally-changing-name-in-india/”