India

RIPE Atlas India coverage and some thoughts

It has been some time since I started pushing Indian community for hosting RIPE Atlas Probes. These probes are small devices designed to be hosted at end user’s connection and do pre-defined as well as user-defined measurement. Measurement includes ping, trace, DNS lookup, SSL check etc. Currently, there are 61 active RIPE Atlas probes. I would say it has +/- of 7-8 probes which go offline and come back online when I request hosts to check.

Solar powered home

And breaking silence over here, last few months went quite busy. I travelled to Cambodia, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong recently for various tasks from APNIC’s IXP workshop in Cambodia to SGNOG in Singapore, APNIC 44 in Taiwan and so on. Apart from this, I went for solar power setup at home here in Haryana since grid has been quite unstable (specifically this year). I think the overall grid is OKish but it’s quite bad in my city due to the construction of an overhead road from where a high voltage line is crossing. That has lead to regular long outages in the area. I think in terms of formal load shedding things are getting better and I am certain Indian Govt. will be able to reach its target of 24 x 7 supply without any shedding before 2022. That would be the key part as we go for electric vehicles in India. But still, I think we won’t get a good stable grid for at least next 6-7 years. Checkout Vidyut Pravah website which gives an idea of load and demand across India. And here is data for Haryana.  

Welcome Facebook (AS32934) to India!

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.

India's digital slum problem

India has a slum problem as many of us know. Slums are a serious problem and there’s just no easy way to fix them. One cannot just push thousands and thousands of people out while at the same time quality of life in slums is terrible. One thing which happens a lot in India is the fact that Govt. does nothing when slums are getting established and once they are established situation gets out of control.    

Prefix hijacks by D-Vois Broadband

Today BGPmon reported about possible BGP prefix hijack of Amazon’s IP address space. Amazon announces 50.16.0.0/16 from AS14618.

At 13:45:44 UTC / 19:15:44 IST D-Vois broadband started originating a more specific 50.16.226.0/24 in the table from AS45769. One of example AS_PATH of this announcement: 198290 197264 197264 197264 29467 1299 9583 45769 Clearly, this leak was carried over by AS9583 (Sify) to AS1299 (Telia) and was carried over to rest of internet from there. There was a visible withdrawal of this request by 14:17:37 UTC / 19:47:37 IST.