It has been some time since I started pushing Indian community for hosting RIPE Atlas Probes. These probes are small devices designed to be hosted at end user’s connection and do pre-defined as well as user-defined measurement. Measurement includes ping, trace, DNS lookup, SSL check etc. Currently, there are 61 active RIPE Atlas probes. I would say it has +/- of 7-8 probes which go offline and come back online when I request hosts to check.
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
Today I spotted some routes from Amazon AWS Cloud services - AS16509 in Indian tables. AS16509 was originating prefixes while sitting in downstream of Tata-VSNL AS4755 and Reliance AS18101. I almost missed Amazon AWS's announcement on their blog about Indian PoPs for their DNS service - Route53 and CDN service - Cloudfront.
New PoP’s of Amazon in India are at Mumbai and Chennai and I see pretty much consistent BGP announcements to Tata and Reliance from these locations. Prefixes I have seen so far:
And finally academic session over. Done with all vivas and related stuff. Next will be exams likely in June. Time for me to get ready for travel. :) Anyways an interesting topic for today’s post - Google Public DNS. Lot of us are familier with popular (and free) DNS resolvers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I have covered reason in previous posts on why it tends to fail with Content Delivery networks like Akamai which rely on anycasting at bottom DNS layer and simple unicasting on application servers. Anycasted DNS nodes point to application servers based on various factors like distance, load, cost etc out of interesting algorithms these CDN networks use for load & cost management. Anyways today’s post focus is not CDN issues with these resolvers but Google Public DNS itself. Are these servers located in India and everywhere else where Google has PoPs? Let’s do a simple trace to get forward path from Airtel to Google’s 8.8.8.8: