India has a slum problem as many of us know. Slums are a serious problem and there’s just no easy way to fix them. One cannot just push thousands and thousands of people out while at the same time quality of life in slums is terrible. One thing which happens a lot in India is the fact that Govt. does nothing when slums are getting established and once they are established situation gets out of control.
Earlier this month I got an opportunity to be part of IXP workshop in Kolkata. It was a 3-day event organised by ISOC Kolkata and supported by APNIC. There was also a workshop on DNSSEC and Champika Wijayatunga (from ICANN) was the instructor along with Anand Raje. It was a nice event and I come to know of other interesting projects ISOC Kolkata is doing like Indian IETF capacity building program apart from the IXP they are running in Kolkata. Mr Anupam Aggarwal and Anand showed the IX and it looks very good. I think it’s the first and only IX I know in India which is a real IX with proper policy. It’s an IX by a non-for-profit group, allows anyone to connect, a real layer 2 IX and welcomes anyone including ISPs, content players and root DNS servers. Presently IIFON-IX in Kolkata has few member ISPs besides the L root from ICANN and one of Verisign gTLD nodes (which host zones for .com, .net etc). I also saw a rack with some of Akamai CDN servers. This brings decent content right there. IX’es play an extremely important part of current internet infrastructure ecosystem. It’s very likely that content of this blog is travelling from my server to your browser from an Internet Exchange. :)
Today BGPmon reported about possible BGP prefix hijack of Amazon’s IP address space. Amazon announces 50.16.0.0/16 from AS14618.
At 13:45:44 UTC / 19:15:44 IST D-Vois broadband started originating a more specific 50.16.226.0/24 in the table from AS45769. One of example AS_PATH of this announcement: 198290 197264 197264 197264 29467 1299 9583 45769 Clearly, this leak was carried over by AS9583 (Sify) to AS1299 (Telia) and was carried over to rest of internet from there. There was a visible withdrawal of this request by 14:17:37 UTC / 19:47:37 IST.
Last week I was on way from Kolkata to Delhi after spending time at ISOC IXP workshop. It was Jet Airways 9W 946 on 10th March 2017. The flight took off slightly late and 90% time went just fine. Original arrival time was 16:30 though it was expected to be little late.
At around 16:15 pilots announced “to prepare for landing” and cabin crew started collecting waste and getting people ready. I was sitting on the window seat and looking at clouds on my right. It was a usual view from the window and I usually like when the plane crosses over the clouds. It was little bumpy by 16:20 and that is usual behaviour. As it proceeded it went from “slightly bumpy” to “very bumpy” ride. Somewhere around 16:25 or so plane gave the first feeling of “free fall”. It’s was the same feeling as we get going down the roller coaster but 10x of that. Few people screamed. It reminded me of one of my previous travels from Malaysia to India in 2013 after APRICOT 2013 when the flight was very bumpy and also faced free fall at that time. Next after 2-3 mins plane had another free fall and it went for 10-15 seconds. A Japanese gentleman sitting next to me wasn’t wearing his shoes. One of his shoes literally touched my chest and fell on me. That was the first time I also got quite scared.
And here goes my first post for 2017. The start of this year did not go well as I broke my hand in Jan and that resulted in a lot of time loss. Now I am almost recovered and in much better condition. I just attended HKNOG 4.0 at Hong Kong followed by APRICOT 2017 at Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. an event and I enjoyed the both. Here’s my presentation from APRICOT 2017. I recently I came across some of crazy confusing traceroutes as passed by one of my friends. I cannot share that exact traceroute on this blog post but can produce the same effect about which I am posting by doing a trace from one of large network like Telia London PoP to one of the Indian destinations via their looking glass