Avinash Meetoo

… on some selected websites but, of course, this is still an excellent news if one takes into account the pathetic bandwidth we had before.

Since a few weeks, some of us have noticed that some websites were very snappy and that downloads from them were much quicker than usual. I investigated and found out the following:

$ nslookup 
> server 202.123.2.6
Default server: 202.123.2.6
Address: 202.123.2.6#53
> www.intel.com
Server:		202.123.2.6
Address:	202.123.2.6#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.intel.com	canonical name = www.intel.com.edgesuite.net.
www.intel.com.edgesuite.net	canonical name = www.intel-sino.com.edgesuite.net.
www.intel-sino.com.edgesuite.net	canonical name = www.intel-sino.com.edgesuite.net.chinaredirector.akadns.net.
www.intel-sino.com.edgesuite.net.chinaredirector.akadns.net	canonical name = a961.g.akamai.net.
Name:	a961.g.akamai.net
Address: 196.27.66.9
Name:	a961.g.akamai.net
Address: 196.27.66.8

Let’s see. www.intel.com which is, of course, the official website of Intel has an IP address of 196.27.66.8 or 196.27.66.9 when the Mauritius Telecom DNS server is queried. More interesting is the fact that those two IP addresses seem to correspond to one server owned by Akamai (i.e. a961.g.akamai.net) From the Akamai website, we read:

Akamai has created a digital operating environment for the Web. Our global platform of thousands of specially-equipped servers helps the Internet withstand the crush of daily requests for rich, dynamic, and interactive content, transactions, and applications. When delivering on these requests, Akamai detects and avoids Internet problem spots and vulnerabilities, to ensure Websites perform optimally, media and software download flawlessly, and applications perform reliably.

Hundreds of enterprises worldwide use our global platform to sell, inform, entertain, market, advertise, deliver software, and conduct their business online.

I knew a company like Intel was an Akamai customer but this didn’t explain the increase in bandwidth in Mauritius. Something more interesting was going on. 196.27.66.8 and 196.27.66.9 looked familiar… Suddenly I understood. They looked like the dynamic IP addresses we have in Mauritius. Maybe 196.27.66.8 and 196.27.66.9 were in Mauritius which would easily explain everything.

I did:

$ whois 196.27.66.9

OrgName:    African Network Information Center
OrgID:      AFRINIC
Address:    03B3 - 3rd Floor - Ebene Cyber Tower
Address:    Cyber City
Address:    Ebene
Address:    Mauritius
City:       Ebene
StateProv:
PostalCode: 0001
Country:    MU

This is cool. It means that 196.27.66.9 is managed by the African Network Information Center, an organization based in Mauritius. To be 100% sure that 196.27.66.9 is really in Mauritius, I did:

$ traceroute 196.27.66.9
traceroute to 196.27.66.9 (196.27.66.9), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  * * *
 2  41.212.192.1 (41.212.192.1)  72.663 ms  10.613 ms  11.346 ms
 3  ADSL-TPLUS-70-97.telecomplus.net (196.27.70.97)  10.627 ms  11.536 ms  11.003 ms
 4  ph-g1-1-1.1662.telecomplus.net (196.192.102.25)  10.251 ms  10.462 ms  11.510 ms
 5  196.27.66.9 (196.27.66.9)  11.108 ms  10.278 ms  10.987 ms

Phew! This is confirmation that a mirror of www.intel.com is, at least for us, Mauritians, found in Mauritius. Notice how 196.27.66.9 is just one hop from ph-g1-1-1.1662.telecomplus.net which belongs to Telecom Plus. Notice how all the IPs start with 196.

I wonder what other websites have already received the Akamai treatment…