Tulip

F root server transit in Chennai

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. :)

Routes leaks by Indian ISPs for NIXI's routes

Interesting days as always. Recently I was handed over “Alumni form” from college. 
Mixed feelings. This brings me to conclusion that I somewhat missed college life but anyways that’s small price I paid for my high obsession with some long term ideas. (ok may be that explains why I don’t have a Facebook account? Stop asking me about it!)

Hard to come to any conclusion at this stage. 

Anyways post for today…