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One of frequent email and contact form message I get my blog is about available content networks in India and where one can peer. There are certain content networks in India and of course most of the content networks have open peering policy and are usually happy with direct inter-connection (we call as “peering”) with the ISP networks (often referred to as “eyeball networks”). Some of these networks have a backbone which connects back to their key datacenter locations on their own circuits via Singapore/Europe, some other have simply placed their caching server where cache fill happens over IP transit. Based on publically known information across community and of course peeringdb, following content players are available in India and known to be open for peering:

An excellent presentation by James Quinn from Facebook on “Being Open How Facebook Got Its Edge” at NANOG68. YouTube link here and video is embedded in the post below.

Some key points mentioned by James:

1. BGP routing is inefficient as scale grows especially around distributing traffic. They can get a lot of traffic concentrated to a specific PoP apart from the fact that BGP best AS_PATH can simply be an inefficient low AS_PATH based path.
2. Facebook comes with a cool idea of “evolving beyond BGP with BGP” where they use BGP concepts to beat some of the BGP-related problems.
3. He also points to fact that IPv6 has much larger address space and huge summarization can result in egress problems for them. A single route announcement can just have almost entire network behind it!
4. Traffic management is based on local and a global controller. Local controller picks efficient routes, injects them via BGP and takes care of traffic balancing within a given PoP/city, balancing traffic across local circuits. On the other hand, Global PoP is based on DNS logic and helps in moving traffic across cities.

It’s wonderful to see that Facebook is solving the performance and load related challenges using fundamental blocks like BGP (local controller) and DNS (global controller). :)

Talking about root DNS server’s anycast at APNIC42. YouTube here.

Bangladesh’s .bd ccTLD faced another outage. As I mentioned in one of the previous posts - .bd domain seems to be primarily on BTCL (AS17494).  Zone delegation of .bd is still pending with PCH and while PCH is mentioned in NS records of the authoritative DNS servers but delegation is pending in the root DNS servers as per reply from Kabindra from PCH on the bdNOG mailing list during the last outage.

Saw this excellent presentation in UKNOF 34 by Peter Stevens from Mythic Beasts. Really enjoyed the challenges and fixes he shared in running an IPv6 only web hosting. A must watch for geeks :)  

Also, UKNOF & NLNOG both seem to have excellent content in their conferences along with professional video recording which they make available over YouTube channels.

An impressive and detailed presentation by Mr. Dave Temkin on how Netflix deploys caching nodes and challenges around them. It’s from Feb last year.

So it seems like apart from voice interconnect issues, Jio is also facing routing issues on the backbone. I ran a trace to one of IP’s on Jio network allocated to end customer - 169.149.212.122. I ran trace from all Indian RIPE Atlas probes measurement here. There seem quite a few RIPE Atlas probes which are giving latency on 150ms + range. Seems like they are downstream or downstream of downstream of Tata Comm’s AS4755 and routing is happening via Singapore!    

One of my friend went for a VM with a German hosting provider. He got single IPv4 (quite common) and a /64 IPv6. Overall /64 per VM/end server used to be ok till few years back but now these days running applications inside LXC containers (OS level virtualization) make more sense. This gives option to maintain separate hosting environment for each application. I personally do that a lot and infect blog which you are reading right now itself is on a LXC container.

In Hong Kong and right on the day when I was leaving for Hong Kong - I noticed a bug in my Macbook Pro’s screen. A real insect yes!   ![img_20160907_151934]https://cdn.anuragbhatia.com/web/post/2016/09/three-days-without-laptop-repair-of-damaged-macbook-pro-screen/images/IMG_20160907_151934-scaled.jpg)

This was irritating. Hard to know how it actually got inside but may be from bottom side of laptop which was missing two screws for a while which I recently bought from UK and added. Apple support couldn’t answer on how it got there. Furthermore I was facing a problem of screen showing pink/green lines after turning on for almost 1.8 years now. They used to show up when laptop was turned on and used to go away after 15-20mins. Over time the issue increased and now it was taking as much as 40-50mins for lines to go away. Since I was visiting Hong Kong for HKNOG 3.0, I booked an appointment with Apple store. Fixing time went quick (over phone call with Apple support) and I was at Apple store in HK right on next day after an overnight flight to Hong Kong. They dropped bill bomb by quoting me $5600 HKD / $720 USD / 48k INR !!!

Day before yesterday i.e on 18th August 2016 Bangladesh’s TLD .bd went had an outage. It was originally reported by Jasim Alam on bdNOG mailing list.

dig btcl.com.bd @8.8.8.8
; <<>> DiG 9.10.4-P2 <<>> btcl.com.bd @8.8.8.8
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 8114
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;btcl.com.bd.                   IN      A
;; Query time: 76 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Thu Aug 18 14:24:25 Bangladesh Standard Time 2016
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 40

His message shows that DNS resolution of BTCL (Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd) was failing. Later Alok Das that it was the power problem resulting in outage. Let’s look ask one of 13 root DNS server about NS records on who has the delegation for .bd.