AS32934

Today I was having a chat with my friend Hari Haran. He mentioned that Facebook has started its PoP in Mumbai. This seems true and Facebook has mentioned GPX Mumbai as their private peering PoP in their peeringdb record.

I triggered a quick test trace to “www.facebook.com” on IPv4 from all Indian RIPE Atlas probes and resolved “www.facebook.com” on the probe itself. The lowest latency is from Airtel Karnataka and that’s still hitting Facebook in Singapore. I do not see any of networks with probe coverage hitting Facebook node locally.

Yesterday Google’s Bangladeshi website google.com.bd was hacked and this happened via DNS. It was reported on the bdNOG mailing list at morning in a thread started by Mr Omar Ali.

This clearly shows how authoritative DNS for “com.bd.” (which is same as bd. btw) was poisoned and was reflecting attackers authoritative DNS. Later Mr Farhad Ahmed posted a screenshot of google.com.bd showing hackers page:

Later Mr Sumon Ahmed mentioned that it happened because web frontend of .bd was compromised. This was an interesting hijack as attacker attacked the key infrastructure of the registry instead of Google or Facebook servers. It’s also a warm reminder of the way DNS depends on the hierarchal structure by design and at this stage, we need to focus on DNSSEC to add on the security to the current system.   Lately .bd domain faced issues multiple time this year. I hope it will have a good stable time in the upcoming year. In terms of stability it is being backed by PCH anycast infrastructure but PCH’s DNS servers are just published in NS records of it’s existing auth servers, but not on the parent zone (which is root zone). Thus the point of failure remains and is yet to be fixed.

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). :)