Major Look - Too Late

(via blog.quux.de)

After receiving yet another 'please login and click through our captcha for no reason' e-mail from a DynDNS provider, I decided to run my own DynDNS server.

As I already run my own DNS servers, this was just a matter of adding a dynamically updateable zone and writing a script which receives the IP change request via HTTP and sends out a DNS update.
Luckily the DynDNS API is quite well documented and I quickly came up with the PHP code below which performs the task well enough for me. Feel free to use it to run your own DynDNS server.

PS: to any friends reading this and looking for a DynDNS service: drop me a message and I'll set you up with an account.

Get the glue records for a given domain:

Update the serial number in BIND zone files with the current unix timestamp.

For a long time it annoyed me every time that less only showed ASCII codes instead of colors when piping some 'color-enabled' output into it.

Turns out there is an easy fix for that:

colordiff a/foo b/foo | less -R

Thanks to Major Hayden for this very useful tip!

openssl gendh -out dh4096.pem 4096

I did another test of the Orange Routing.
Running a traceroute to my server in Zurich and one to my vhost in Frankfurt.
First another version of the already familier traceroute to my server in Zurich:

HOST: Andreass-MacBook-Pro.local  Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 172.20.10.1                0.0%     5    8.0   3.7   2.1   8.0   2.5
  2.|-- 10.8.8.67                  0.0%     5  174.8 114.9  56.7 205.6  69.8
  3.|-- 10.8.12.10                 0.0%     5  126.8 108.4  67.7 171.3  42.8
  4.|-- 192.168.249.201            0.0%     5   73.4  82.7  61.9 111.5  20.5
  5.|-- 192.168.253.191            0.0%     5   54.0  64.9  54.0  75.9   9.3
  6.|-- 192.168.250.203            0.0%     5   64.7  69.2  57.3  79.2   8.4
  7.|-- 10.10.10.10                0.0%     5   56.8  65.5  56.8  72.1   7.7
  8.|-- 10.255.200.1               0.0%     5   65.9  87.3  60.1 146.6  35.1
  9.|-- pos0-1-1-1.gencr1.geneve.  0.0%     5   84.8 117.1  76.4 162.5  36.9
 10.|-- pos14-0-1.pascr4.paris.op  0.0%     5   88.1 118.0  88.1 168.3  36.7
 11.|-- ge6-0-0.br2.par2.alter.ne  0.0%     5   76.5  90.5  76.5 109.1  12.0
 12.|-- so-2-3-0.xt2.zur3.alter.n  0.0%     5   76.8 109.1  76.8 203.2  53.1
 13.|-- pos2-0.gw4.zur4.alter.net  0.0%     5   88.8  98.7  84.3 143.4  25.2
 14.|-- uch200193-gw.customer.alt  0.0%     5   90.7  85.3  74.1  93.5   8.0
 15.|-- whale29.open.ch            0.0%     5   88.9  97.7  88.9 104.7   6.3
 16.|-- orca8.open.ch              0.0%     5   90.8  94.8  90.8 102.8   4.9
 17.|-- real.jaggi.info           20.0%     5  234.8 130.0  92.8 234.8  69.9

Now the traceroute to the vhost in Frankfurt:

HOST: Andreass-MacBook-Pro.local  Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 172.20.10.1                0.0%     5   15.2  13.1   1.9  44.5  18.4
  2.|-- 10.8.8.115                 0.0%     5   72.6  74.0  67.2  81.3   6.8
  3.|-- 10.8.12.10                 0.0%     5   80.7  75.0  64.0  89.6  10.3
  4.|-- 192.168.249.201            0.0%     5   65.1  78.9  65.1  94.0  12.3
  5.|-- 192.168.253.191            0.0%     5   73.1  70.4  66.5  73.3   2.8
  6.|-- 192.168.250.203            0.0%     5   69.5  73.9  66.3  86.6   7.7
  7.|-- 10.10.10.10                0.0%     5   67.0  72.7  67.0  80.0   4.9
  8.|-- 10.255.200.1               0.0%     5   70.9  74.4  69.7  86.4   7.0
  9.|-- pos0-1-1-1.gencr1.geneve.  0.0%     5   77.2  83.4  75.9  99.4   9.4
 10.|-- pos3-1-0.zurcr1.zurich.op  0.0%     5   83.8 103.2  83.8 146.9  26.3
 11.|-- pos0-9-4-0.ffttr1.frankfu  0.0%     5  102.9 103.6  98.7 108.8   4.9
 12.|-- leaseweb-9.gw.opentransit  0.0%     5   87.6  88.8  85.3  93.2   3.0
 13.|-- te3-1.core-2.fra.leaseweb  0.0%     5   85.4  91.5  85.4 106.1   8.5
 14.|-- hosted-by.leaseweb.com     0.0%     5   90.2  94.1  84.7 112.5  11.0
 15.|-- ???                       100.0     5    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
 16.|-- 0.jaggi.info              20.0%     5   89.9 117.5  86.3 205.5  58.7

As you can see, the RTT is higher for the server in Zurich than for the vhost in Frankfurt! (keep in mind that source of these measurement is my laptop in the train 8 minutes away from Zurich now)

So Orange has higher latency to hosts in the same region/city than to hosts in another country which are more than 350km away. :-(
The next time I choose a mobile provider it might be good to analyse its BGP peerings and routing policies first...

While in the train from Bern to Zurich, I did a traceroute towards the server which currently hosts this weblog (it is located at Open Systems in Zurich). The connection starts on my laptop and is thethered via my cell to the Orange backbone.

HOST: Andreass-MacBook-Pro.local  Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 172.20.10.1                0.0%     5    2.0  12.1   1.7  33.2  14.6
  2.|-- 10.8.8.67                  0.0%     5   52.2 373.4  52.2 1241. 504.8
  3.|-- 10.8.12.10                 0.0%     5   50.9 347.4  50.9 1143. 453.3
  4.|-- 192.168.249.201            0.0%     5   51.2 282.7  51.2 1042. 426.8
  5.|-- 192.168.253.191            0.0%     5   51.2 226.2  44.5 942.2 400.3
  6.|-- 192.168.250.203            0.0%     5   51.4 206.7  37.9 847.5 358.2
  7.|-- 10.10.10.10                0.0%     5   50.0 181.4  29.6 746.9 316.2
  8.|-- 10.255.200.1               0.0%     5   50.0 172.2  36.9 645.6 264.9
  9.|-- 193.251.248.145            0.0%     4   60.2  59.8  46.2  81.9  15.8
 10.|-- 193.251.240.53             0.0%     4   70.0  76.4  64.9 101.6  16.9
 11.|-- 146.188.112.77             0.0%     4   70.4  74.0  69.2  83.8   6.7
 12.|-- 146.188.5.1                0.0%     4   70.6  71.7  58.1  88.1  12.3
 13.|-- 146.188.4.194              0.0%     4   70.5  61.9  51.6  70.9  10.2
 14.|-- 146.188.64.74              0.0%     4   71.3  69.2  58.8  75.4   7.2
 15.|-- 213.156.230.29             0.0%     4   71.5  78.3  62.6 108.9  20.7
 16.|-- 213.156.229.8              0.0%     4   72.2  75.2  70.4  81.9   5.1
 17.|-- 213.156.229.222           25.0%     4   80.8  76.2  61.2  86.5  13.3

You can see that the traffic is passed through 8 different routers inside the Orange backbone (using IPs from all three RFC1918 ranges...) before it is let onto the Internet.
And then the real fun starts (let's use DNS names for this):

HOST: Andreass-MacBook-Pro.local  Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 172.20.10.1                0.0%     5    2.0  12.2   1.9  33.3  14.5
  2.|-- 10.8.8.67                  0.0%     5   44.2 345.6  27.0 1167. 494.2
  3.|-- 10.8.12.10                 0.0%     5   52.2 308.9  27.0 1104. 462.4
  4.|-- 192.168.249.201            0.0%     5   33.4 264.9  27.2 1014. 427.1
  5.|-- 192.168.253.191            0.0%     5   30.3 227.5  27.3 952.9 406.4
  6.|-- 192.168.250.203            0.0%     5   50.4 200.7  27.0 860.0 368.7
  7.|-- 10.10.10.10                0.0%     5   72.4 193.5  30.5 779.2 327.8
  8.|-- 10.255.200.1               0.0%     5   31.8 166.8  27.6 688.0 291.5
  9.|-- pos0-1-1-1.gencr1.geneve.  0.0%     4   50.8  55.0  47.6  67.1   8.6
 10.|-- pos14-0-1.pascr4.paris.op  0.0%     4   61.0  64.4  57.7  78.5   9.5
 11.|-- ge6-0-0.br2.par2.alter.ne  0.0%     4   70.8  56.3  48.4  70.8   9.9
 12.|-- so-2-3-0.xt2.zur3.alter.n  0.0%     4  108.9  65.6  48.0 108.9  29.2
 13.|-- pos2-0.gw4.zur4.alter.net  0.0%     4   51.7  55.5  50.3  68.8   8.8
 14.|-- uch200193-gw.customer.alt  0.0%     4  171.8  83.6  50.7 171.8  58.8
 15.|-- whale29.open.ch            0.0%     4  132.1  90.0  59.2 132.1  32.7
 16.|-- orca8.open.ch              0.0%     4   72.4  66.8  58.6  73.5   7.3
 17.|-- real.jaggi.info           25.0%     4   80.2  64.7  56.2  80.2  13.4

As we see, Orange injects their mobile data traffic into the Internet in Geneva (pos0-1-1-1.gencr1.geneve.).
Then it is first sent to Paris (pas14-0-1.pascr4.paris.op and ge6-0-0.br2.par2.alter.ne) and from there back to Zurich (so-2-3-0.xt2.yur3.alter.n and all the following hosts).

I can kind of understand that the traffic is routed via Geneva (main Orange infrastructure is there), but why is it sent to Paris? (especially since Geneva<->Zurich is the main Internet connection inside Switzerland where most of the countries fiber is buried).

I guess this explains why my mobile data speed is not always as fast as I like it to be...

When using more than one dynamic routing protocol, make sure to know their administrative distance.

Further it is usually a bad idea to redistribute routes from a dynamic routing protocol into another one with a lower administrative distance. Especially when having multiple handover points between the two protocols.