CDN

APNIC and RIPE NCC are doing a hackathon at APRICOT 2018. It just started today with some light interaction with various participating members yesterday. The theme of the hackathon is around IPv6. Many cool projects were suggested yesterday and teams started working today on certain shortlisted projects like:

1. A tool for ranking CDNs - A tool based on RIPE Atlas data to rank CDNs based on latency across different regions.
2. An IPv6 fun word game - Where anyone with a member account can suggest a word, and compete with other members who share more IPv6 addresses. It may include things like showcasing creative use of hexadecimal strings in an IPv6 address like Facebook popularly does face:b00c in their IPv6 pools.
3. IPv4 and IPv6 network security  - Study of attacks and overall security in IPv6. It would involve study and possibly a report on various attack vectors in the IPv6 domain.
4. A countrywide report on IPv6 deployment - I have yet to see how it is different from existing other reports.
5. IPv6 tunnel detection - Figuring out where tunnels used and figuring out the IPv4 address of those endpoints via a javascript plugin and possibly comparing IPv4 Vs IPv6 performance.

Let’s see how things go in next 12hrs. Super fun. Things should show up on Github in next few hours. :)

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). :)

Some updates from personal life…

I have joined Fremont based IP backbone & colocation provider - Hurricane Electric and would be working on some cool things at AS6939. :)  

Updates on blog…

I have changed theme and entire look of blog and re-designed it with new plugins, more tweaking etc. As of now blog has more cleaner while theme which gives more space for posting, improved security with some ACLs, forced HTTPS to avoid telcos from injecting iframe in readers on 3G networks (which is very bad and worrying). Also, with use of bunch of plugins, now my I am hosting all static media content on AWS S3 to avoid local storage on server, it’s backup etc. Running it on AWS S3 with Geo replication + Cloudfront for CDN/efficient delivery made much more sense. Though sad that there’s no easy way for integration of Google Cloud storage with wordpress. S3 being more mature product makes it easier.

Just was looking around at EDNS support by Google. To find how it supports and how packet looks like I created a test NS records for dnstest.anuragbhatia.com pointing to one of test server (178.238.225.247). I wasn’t running any DNS server on the server. Just ran quick tcpdump.  

At server end:

sudo tcpdump 'port 53 and dst 178.238.225.247' -nn -vvv -w sample.pcap

Then I forcefully triggered DNS queries via Google’s recursor using:**

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.