Pch

Day before yesterday i.e on 18th August 2016 Bangladesh’s TLD .bd went had an outage. It was originally reported by Jasim Alam on bdNOG mailing list.

dig btcl.com.bd @8.8.8.8
; <<>> DiG 9.10.4-P2 <<>> btcl.com.bd @8.8.8.8
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 8114
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;btcl.com.bd.                   IN      A
;; Query time: 76 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Thu Aug 18 14:24:25 Bangladesh Standard Time 2016
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 40

His message shows that DNS resolution of BTCL (Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd) was failing. Later Alok Das that it was the power problem resulting in outage. Let’s look ask one of 13 root DNS server about NS records on who has the delegation for .bd.

Last year a really good project Letsencrypt came up. They key objective of this project is to help in securing web by pushing SSL everywhere.  

Two key cool features

1. It offer free signed SSL certs!
2. It helps in setting up SSL via an agent seamlessly without having to deal with CSR, getting it signed & updating web server configuration.

At this stage Letsencrypt is itself a Certificate Authority and but it’s root certs are yet not in the browser. It’s probably going to take a while till all major browsers get their certificate. To help on that one of it’s sponsors IdenTrust has signed their intermediate certs. Hence certs signed by Letsencrypt are accepted by all browsers right away. All certs signed by Letsencypt are signed by Letencrypt Authority X1 which have signature from DST Root CA X3 which is accepted by pretty much all popular browsers. You can read more about How it works here.   Here’s an example of SSL setup for say “demo.anuragbhatia.com” test domain which is already up and working without SSL. http://demo.anuragbhatia.com shows a plain text page. This is Apache running on Ubuntu server. The Apache web config is pretty straightforward.

Some important life changes…

I am not with Cloudaccess.net anymore. It was very nice experience of setting up AS54456 from scratch along with design of anycasting DNS instances.  Wishing Cloudaccess.net good luck for time ahead.

I just started working with Packet Clearing House (PCH). Looking forward towards exciting time ahead! Interesting pages to checkout - Anycasting DNS for TLDs  & Peering information. 

Thanks for reading.