... at three NIXI (www.nixi.org - the indian IXP) POPs - Delhi, Bombay
and Madras.
About time too.
There's a fourth metro in India - Calcutta, which is the capital of a
state that has one of two democratically elected communist governments
in the world, by the way - the other being the Indian state of Kerala.
[and the party in power in Calcutta is also part of the ruling
coalition in the Indian government].
Now for comments in that admirable institution, the Indian press.
Two things -
The move will help bring down the cost of accessing Internet in
India, where the clone root servers have been set up in Delhi, Mumbai
and Chennai. "Normally, other countries get to host only two such
services, but we fought hard and got three," said communications and
IT minister Dayanidhi Maran.
Maran seems to think this is as big an achievement as a kid throwing a
tantrum to get three chocolate bars instead of two, which it is not ..
and, from a post on another mailing list that I read -
Mr. Paul Wilson, Director General APNIC and Mr. Axel Pawlik, Managing
Director - RIPE will be in Delhi between 25-26 August 2005 in connection
with Integration of Internet Root Servers in India.
Ah. Calcutta left out of the race, and those dreaded foreign
imperialist powers are behind it all.
I confidently expect our friendly comrades in Calcutta will feel duty
bound to call for a general strike (something they were proverbial for
doing at the drop of a hat, till quite recently ...)
thanks
the minister's parents, or the clerk who filled in his birth
certificate made a mistake .. i do think his surname is actually
"moron" and not "maran"
srs
Dang. That was supposed to be offlist, sorry for the noise all.
Interesting how these myths pop up...
As of a few weeks ago there were 97 root server instances listed on www.root-servers.org, so this presumably brings it up to 100 unless there were more deployments that I've missed in the last few weeks.
Of those, the countries that each have two root servers are:
Canada
Spain
France
Switzerland
Sweden
Finland
UAE
Hong Kong
Indonesia
New Zealand
South Africa
So that's 22 root servers. The other 78 are in countries that either have only one or more than two.
The two in Johhannesburg are the only two in Africa. South America has only one in the entire continent.
-Steve
Sorry, looking at this again, I think I understand what the Minister was saying.
If we look at the Asia-Pacific region (for these purposes everything east of the UAE and West of the Americas), and then exclude Japan, Korea, and Singapore, countries that are undisputably part of the Internet core, what we've got are a bunch of F and I Roots, with a K Root in Brisbane and now a K Root somewhere in India. Having root servers that are part of three different anycast clouds would make India somewhat special within its region.
-Steve
The crying shame of it all is that most ISPs, for various reasons
[below] don't advertise all their routes at nixi - and so exchange
piddly little amounts of traffic where they could exchange LOTS more.
So, you'd find a whole lot of Indian traceroutes, even between two
local ISPs, go out through Singapore (or possibly Reach / NTT now, in
some cases), and/or PAIX
Having three anycast instances in a country is no damned use when the
nearest roots, network wise, are elsewhere. If traffic stats from
those things are available, and are studied, I am reasonably sure we'd
get some interesting results.
But for now, having X number of anycast roots in the country is only
scoring brownie points in the i-governance debate.
--srs
Reasons include -
* don't have good people with bgp clue, only "senior network admins"
who ask Philip Smith what a route map is, in an advanced bgp tutorial
at a recent SANOG...
* don't trust each other too much at all, and fear that peering means
that people can rip them off by using those links for transit as well
* have a network that's a mess of botched mpls and other
implementations, all held together by a bunch of static routes
upstream
* or in some cases have, besides their usual IP space, a huge lot of
deaggregated IP blocks that are a legacy from when they had a whole
lot of leased lines purchased from the then incumbent + sole upstream
VSNL ..