Bangladesh

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.

Last week while travelling to London from Delhi IGI airport I was standing in immigration queue. One of fellow passenger (likely from Bihar as per my guess from his accent) came right behind me. He was bit afraid and asked me in low voice if those (immigration) gates would get him to his flight for Dubai. I smiled and told him that it’s common passage for everyone travelling to just anywhere and explained to him about his gate by looking at his boarding pass. By this time he appeared less worried and stood silently behind me. After few mins as queue proceeded a group of 4 travellers (again of similar profile) proceeded to immigration desk and I heard multiple immigration officers screaming/shouting on them for coming to their desk without boarding pass. I even heard a loud noise.

Last month India & Bangladesh went into an agreement for power and bandwidth. India stated export of an additional 100MW of power to Bangladesh while Bangladesh started a 10Gbps link to Indian state of Tripura. (News article on this here)

Tripura is an Indian state having its boundaries with Bangladesh as you can see in above map. Coming to routing side of things setup is that BSNL (AS9829) is buying IP transit from Bangladesh Submarine Cable Co. Ltd (BSCCL) at $1.2 million / year. This means a cost of around $10/Mbps/month or 662Rs/Mbps/month. It’s hard to say if it’s good or bad since other link from BSNL is via it’s other links. But yes it’s good to see a layer 3 connectivity in terms of IP transit relationship rather then leasing dark fiber or L1 waves as they would have caused bit inefficient routing in the area. In order to do this BSNL has setup a “gateway node” at Agartala. I think it would be pretty much a node with approvals under ILD from doT and extremely likely a LIM device for lawful interception.   Months before it actually came up, Dyn research tweeted about this visible routing relationship.  

This week I presented in bdNOG 4 on “Misused top ASNs”. It was a study we at Hurricane Electric did to see how many times AS1, AS2 and AS3 appeared in global routing table between 2010 and 2015. This highlights cases where AS1, AS2 or AS3 appeared as a result of wrong prepend.  

My presentation is embedded below:

Overall bdNOG 4 had been a great experience. It’s good to see a nice NOG community actively sharing technical know-how, sharing experiences, and much more. I must say that is something I greatly miss in India. More on bdNOG conference later on.