NIXI

Seems like NPIX traffic has started hitting 1Gbps levels and that is just so amazing. Came across this post by Niranjan.

NPIX or Nepal Internet Exchange is located in Kathmandu and operates out of its own datacenter. There’s a huge amount of (overhead) dark fibre availability in Kathmandu and as of the writing of this post I see 30 members at NPIX. 1Gbps might seem low from Western IX’es standards but that’s a quite good amount of traffic for an IX in South Asian region. If you see the member list there are just smaller ISPs and not many content players over there. Comparing numbers by NIXI traffic,

Earlier this month I got an opportunity to be part of IXP workshop in Kolkata. It was a 3-day event organised by ISOC Kolkata and supported by APNIC. There was also a workshop on DNSSEC and Champika Wijayatunga (from ICANN) was the instructor along with Anand Raje. It was a nice event and I come to know of other interesting projects ISOC Kolkata is doing like Indian IETF capacity building program apart from the IXP they are running in Kolkata. Mr Anupam Aggarwal and Anand showed the IX and it looks very good. I think it’s the first and only IX I know in India which is a real IX with proper policy. It’s an IX by a non-for-profit group, allows anyone to connect, a real layer 2 IX and welcomes anyone including ISPs, content players and root DNS servers. Presently IIFON-IX in Kolkata has few member ISPs besides the L root from ICANN and one of Verisign gTLD nodes (which host zones for .com, .net etc). I also saw a rack with some of Akamai CDN servers. This brings decent content right there. IX’es play an extremely important part of current internet infrastructure ecosystem. It’s very likely that content of this blog is travelling from my server to your browser from an Internet Exchange. :)  

So it seems like apart from voice interconnect issues, Jio is also facing routing issues on the backbone. I ran a trace to one of IP’s on Jio network allocated to end customer - 169.149.212.122. I ran trace from all Indian RIPE Atlas probes measurement here. There seem quite a few RIPE Atlas probes which are giving latency on 150ms + range. Seems like they are downstream or downstream of downstream of Tata Comm’s AS4755 and routing is happening via Singapore!    

K root in Noida seems to be not getting enough traffic from quite sometime and connectivity does seems bit broken. This is a blog post following up to Dyn’s excellent and detailed post about how TIC leaked the world famous 193.0.14.0/24 address space used by AS25152. It was good to read this post from RIPE NCC written by my friend Emile (and thanks to him for crediting me to signal about traffic hitting outside!)  

Today I met a good friend and he has recently moved back into Rohtak (like me!) and was crying over BSNL’s issues. He has issues of unstable DSL due to last mile and I told him that even if last mile works well, BSNL still has got ton of issues with their IP backbone traffic.   It’s Sunday late night out here in India and I am having really pathetic connectivity with just everywhere except Google. With Google only key difference I noted is that my TCP session to Google’s services is terminating at Mumbai and not Delhi anymore. First and formost, I did trace to spectranet.in (which is last company I was working for) to see how is my latency with server hosting it:

Just finished with SANOG 26 conference and tutorials. It went very nice. Interestingly this time conference did not start early morning like it did in SANOG 24 at Noida. It was rather late in afternoon. Also, on very good note - there were less Govt. bureaucrats to bore attendees with usual stuff they always talk about but have very little idea. One specific interesting presentation was  Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless in India by Prof Abhay Karandikar (from IIT Mumbai). In start I felt it to be usual crappy 5G talk but later realized it was much more interesting. I loved the idea “Have 2Mbps everywhere static broadband and not some absurd number on mobile wireless broadband as we hear in case of 3G/4G. Although 2Mbps now is much slower and I would rather suggest that we target for 10Mbps everywhere (something which can be supported by copper/coax/fiber hybrid) but anyways it was nice refreshing talk. His thoughts were interesting but mostly impractical since had high dependence on useless project like NOFN. For the next part, we had a nice theme of keeping network simple which everyone kind of liked. Simplicity in Network Design & Deployments by Dany Pinto (from Colt) and Unified Forwarding with Segment Routing by Mohan Nanduri (from Microsoft Azure Cloud WAN team) were part of that. Santanu Dasgupta gave a presentation about Challenges of L2NID based Metro-E Architecture for vCPE/NFV Deployments and kind of confused everyone. :P

And my post on 1st April. Don’t take it as April fool post ;)

Multiple times NIXI’s AS24029 has been reported as acting like transit ASN for multiple networks. I have analysed it in past and this is very much because of route leaks by few specific networks. I have explained difference in peering Vs transit routes and their handling previously on my blog.

In short: A network is supposed to re-announce it’s peering and transit routes only to customer and not to any other peer or upstream. Whenever NIXI’s ASN appears in global routing table, its always the case where one or more networks are re-announcing routes learnt via NIXI to their upstream transits. 

Earlier this month Dyn started with it’s Indian PoP. I came across news from Dyn’s blog post. It’s very good to see first Amazon AWS and now Dyn in India. With a warm welcome to Dyn let’s look at their Indian deployment.

Dyn using AS33517 which seems to be having upstream from Tata-VSNL AS4755 and Airtel AS9498. 

Dyn seems to be announcing 103.11.203.0/24 to both networks in Mumbai to transit. There are routes in global IPv4 routing table which show Tata & Airtel as transit for Dyn. It cannot be just a /24. I am sure there are more prefixes which are very likely locally announced. Since deployment is at Mumbai, let’s try to look at NIXI Mumbai for prefixes.We can see Tata AS4755 is using 218.100.48.85 and Airtel is using 218.100.48.86 from NIXI route server at Mumbai with simple “sh ip bgp sum” query. I tried taking entire table of Tata as well as of Airtel from NIXI route server but not able to get it beyond few thousand routes. 

Few days back I noticed F root server (which is with ISC) brought it’s anycasted node in NIXI Chennai back live. They have taken that down as per my interaction with them over mailing list. My last post about F root coming back live was with guess work on who’s providing upstream.   Today I spent sometime in finding who’s providing transit to that node. It is very important to note that most of these key infrastructure related nodes rely on peering for most of traffic but a transit in form of full table or default stays so that one can push packets to a route if it is not in table learnt from peering. In case of Indian deployment which was at NIXI Chennai - many ISPs were following regional routes clause of NIXI and were announcing just their regional routes (to ISC’s F root router) but quite a few of them (like BSNL) were still learning routes from one region and exporting them into their other region via their IGP. This brought case where my router (sitting on BSNL link) was getting a forward path to NIXI Chennai for F root but there was return path from F root to my system because BSNL wasn’t announcing Northern prefixes in Chennai based NIXI. As I noted earlier F root is back live in India and I am getting consistant and direct routes. It seems very much the case of addition of transit on that node. Today I was looking at global table dump and I came across some interesting routes which revealed who is probably the transit for ISC’s F root in India. :)

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. When I informed ISC (root server operator for F root) about it, they took down the Indian anycasting instance in order to work on fix.