dns

Welcome Amazon AWS AS16509 to India!

Anurag Bhatia
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.

F-root DNS node back up in Chennai!

Anurag Bhatia
And finally ACN i.e “Advanced Computer Networks” exam next. Hopefully less to cram in this one and syllabus is pretty interesting. Talking about networks - I am very happy to post this update. Finally F root server’s node in Chennai is back up! Though ISC did not updated me about this development but anyways I can always assume they were busy in hitting head with India bureaucratic bodies. :) If you are following my blog, you might have seen my past blog post about “Broken connectivity of F root server” due to NIXI’s routing policies.

Backend of Google's Public DNS

Anurag Bhatia
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.

Airtel hijacking NXDOMAIN queries

Anurag Bhatia
Back in India after amazing APRICOT 2013 at Singapore. It was nice to stay in East Asia for a while and look around. :) Anyways, issue for today - I have been using Airtel DNS servers from quite sometime since BSNL has crappy DNS while Google gives issues with Akamai while OpenDNS doesn’t has any node in India yet. Today I noticed a NXDOMAIN redirection for a non-working domain and later investigated.

Google Public DNS and Akamai issues in India

Anurag Bhatia
A quick blog post on a interesting issue coming up due to combined problem of CDN failure on Google Public DNS and bad Akamai performance due to Tata-NTT peering issue. I was trying Zembra mail since there’s no more free Google Apps edition and one of my friend asked me to basic email on his domain up. It was more or less a straight task by installing Zembra with decent GUI.