CDN

This post covers how I self hosted this blog with availability and geo distribution.

This post covers update on Facebook FNA caches and IP backbone

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 was recently discussing with a friend Jio’s Fifa streaming issues. Considering PNI capacity challenges with other telcos, I wonder if they were serving FIFA streams out of their network or if it would be on some CDN like Akamai. As I was testing, I noticed a couple of megs of flow data with my provider’s local IP. Turns out that was a local Google GGC node in Rohtak and as I try to connect to it, it replies on HTTP port 80 and 443. The port 443 response is rather more interesting because while connecting to IP throws an error, it does give me the SSL certificate out of handshake and now I know it’s indeed Google! :)

As returning readers of this blog would be aware - I found a trick to find Facebook caching servers around the world during the APRICOT 2018 hackathon. Since then I am running my code again every year to see the changes and publish this report.

Previous reports

1. March 2018 here
2. Nov 2019 here
3. April 2021 here

Facebook knows!

Back in 2019, I was in San Francisco, California for NANOG 75. While roaming around in the lobby, someone read the NANOG card hanging around my neck and greeted me. His 2nd line after greeting was “Oh I know that name, you are the guy who mapped our caching nodes” and we both laughed. I must say this specific category of the post has brought some attention around.