Akamai

I have been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for the last few days. This is my first travel to Mongolia and this far up in the North (except for previous travel to Russia in 2016 and some parts of Nordic areas in Europe). Geographically Mongolia is located between Russia (on the North side) and China (on the South side).

I am here for mnNOG 5 event. mnNOG is the Mongolian Network Operators Group. On Monday mnNOG conducted it’s 5th annual conference and it followed a five-day workshop. I am doing a workshop here on Network automation along with engineers from local networks. Mongolia is a landlocked country with no access to sea and hence no sub-sea cable. For the internet Mongolia relies on in-land fibre optic cables to connect to Russia and China. Though cables connect physically via Russia and China, I do not see Mongolian networks doing L3 termination in Russia or Mainland China. Instead, there is connectivity to Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt etc. for the L3 connectivity. Interestingly due to it’s geographic location, a bit of China-Russia internet traffic exchange happens via Mongolia.

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)

Writing this post from my hotel room in Kathmandu. I found that many of the servers appear to be DNS resolvers which is unusual.
Have a look at these weird DNS replies:

dig @anuragbhatia.com . ns +short
a.root-servers.net.
b.root-servers.net.
c.root-servers.net.
d.root-servers.net.
e.root-servers.net.
f.root-servers.net.
g.root-servers.net.
h.root-servers.net.
i.root-servers.net.
j.root-servers.net.
k.root-servers.net.
l.root-servers.net.
m.root-servers.net.

dig @google.com . ns +short
b.root-servers.net.
c.root-servers.net.
d.root-servers.net.
e.root-servers.net.
f.root-servers.net.
g.root-servers.net.
h.root-servers.net.
i.root-servers.net.
j.root-servers.net.
k.root-servers.net.
l.root-servers.net.
m.root-servers.net.
a.root-servers.net.

This seems unusual and is the result of basically port 53 DNS hijack. Let’s try to verify it using popular “whoami.akamai.net” query.

Just finished with SANOG 26 conference and tutorials. It went very nice. Interestingly this time conference did not start early morning like it did in SANOG 24 at Noida. It was rather late in afternoon. Also, on very good note - there were less Govt. bureaucrats to bore attendees with usual stuff they always talk about but have very little idea. One specific interesting presentation was  Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless in India by Prof Abhay Karandikar (from IIT Mumbai). In start I felt it to be usual crappy 5G talk but later realized it was much more interesting. I loved the idea “Have 2Mbps everywhere static broadband and not some absurd number on mobile wireless broadband as we hear in case of 3G/4G. Although 2Mbps now is much slower and I would rather suggest that we target for 10Mbps everywhere (something which can be supported by copper/coax/fiber hybrid) but anyways it was nice refreshing talk. His thoughts were interesting but mostly impractical since had high dependence on useless project like NOFN. For the next part, we had a nice theme of keeping network simple which everyone kind of liked. Simplicity in Network Design & Deployments by Dany Pinto (from Colt) and Unified Forwarding with Segment Routing by Mohan Nanduri (from Microsoft Azure Cloud WAN team) were part of that. Santanu Dasgupta gave a presentation about Challenges of L2NID based Metro-E Architecture for vCPE/NFV Deployments and kind of confused everyone. :P

And I am back from Malaysia after attending APRICOT 2014. It was a slightly slow event this time as less people came up due to change of location from Thailand to Malaysia. But I kind of enjoy the APRICOT in start of year. :)

It has been quite sometime when I blogged. After getting into Spectranet I got relatively more busy along with bit of travelling to Delhi NCR which has been taking lot of time. I wish to blog more over time.