[Aftld-members] Measuring Internet Resilience - Uganda Internet shutdown

[Nishal Goburdhan]

[to prevent unnecessary work for the list-admin, i have removed the -wg 
that i am not subscribed to in my response]

On 19 Jan 2021, at 11:14, Dr P Nyirenda wrote:

> It appears that the recent Internet shutdown in Uganda may have 
> provided a great
> opportunity to measure Internet Resilience in Africa even if this 
> would have been around a
> "black hole".
>
> Did anyone attempt to make any such measurements ?
> For example, how did the Uganda ccTLD .ug fare during the shutdowm?
> Did .ug go down during shutdown?

from my perspective, testing from various places, it did not.   the .UG 
ccTLD is widely anycast, and was still operational during the shutdown.  
i verified this at several times, but did not think this material enough 
to write it up.

as a reminder, if you are worried about your ccTLD’s resiliency, PCH 
will be very happy to provide anycast services *at no cost* to any 
ccTLD;  we already do this for a large portion of the world [1].  please 
feel free to mail me off-list.

here’s a snapshot to show the origin asns for the ns-set for .UG.  
there’s a good variety of ASNs here;  kudos to the .UG team!
the script i ran, is a really simple shell-script that i’ve listed 
below [2].

nishal at jnb:~$ bin/ns-origin.sh ug.
Bulk mode; whois.cymru.com [2021-01-26 08:07:58 +0000]
42      | 204.61.216.60    | WOODYNET-1, US
37177   | 196.216.168.42   | AFRINIC-ANYCAST, MU
37177   | 2001:43f8:120::42                        | AFRINIC-ANYCAST, MU
20294   | 212.88.97.132    | MTN-, UG
197000  | 2001:67c:e0::52                          | RIPE-NCC-AUTHDNS-AS 
Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), NL
197000  | 193.0.9.52       | RIPE-NCC-AUTHDNS-AS Reseaux IP Europeens 
Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), NL
26710   | 2001:500:89::53                          | 
ICANN-ANYCASTED-SERVICES, US
26710   | 199.4.138.53     | ICANN-ANYCASTED-SERVICES, US


> What did connectivity look like to those neighbouring Uganda network 
> wise ?
> Would be great to hear some answers or experience in a technical 
> manner, just curious.

from well-connected networks in ZA and TZ, i was unable to reach the 
regulator’s website (housed in UG).  i was able to reach the state 
house website (https://www.statehouse.go.ug/government) because from my 
perspective, this was *not* housed in UG at the time;  the irony was not 
lost on me ..
i _was_ able to get to the UIXP statistics page (housed in UG).  i was 
also able to reach a very small set of known to be UG based resources.  
i did not think that it was wise pointing out that there were 
“holes” in the blanket, and to draw attention to these.

anecdotal information from colleagues in UG indicate that mobile data 
was unavailable on handsets, and that for Joe Average, it really did 
appear to be a blackout.

—n.
[1] https://www.pch.net/services/dns_anycast

[2]  nishal at jnb:~$ cat bin/ns-origin.sh
#!/bin/bash

if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
     echo "Usage: $0 {domain}"
     exit 1
fi

DOMAIN="$1"
SERVER="whois.cymru.com"
PORT="43"

exec 3<>/dev/tcp/${SERVER}/${PORT}
echo "begin" >&3
dig +nssearch $DOMAIN |awk '{print $11}' >&3
echo "end" >&3
cat <&3

exit $?