For a while, I have been looking for a smokeping alternative for latency monitoring from different servers spread around. While smokeping has survived well over time, in 2023 it feels like an outdated package, with limited options, lacks federation etc. This post from Karan Sharma / Zerodha on “Monitoring my home network” was exciting. His setup included a telegraph agent on a local server, Prometheus to scrap data and Grafana to draw latency data.

Earlier in March I visited Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The trip was purely personal as my wife happened to have been born there. These are Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal located in the South East of West Bengal and geographically quite near Myanmar and Thailand. The nearest large Indian cities on the mainland are Kolkata and Chennai. In the initial part of the trip, we stayed in Swaraj Dweep (old name Havelock islands) and later in Port Blair.

Background I am running my own authoritative DNS servers for the last few years. In earlier stages I just used registrar-provided DNS, later moved to “Cloud provider” provided DNS and ultimately settled for running my own auth DNS. Two major requirements pushed me to self-host auth DNS: Requirement of REST API for DNS needed by the web servers to resolve Letsencrypt certbot DNS-based challenge. This allows me to have internally hosted tools with Letsencrypt issues TLS certificates instead of self-signed ones.

(Note: Unusual post, not about network routing or Linux systems. For purely technical audience of this blog, feel free to pass unless you have a young kid at home!) In Sept 2021 - my wife and I were blessed with a baby boy (Avyukt). He is now around 1.6 years old. Since Oct 2022 he is wearing specs on his eyes. It’s not common (so far) to see babies that young with eye specs, this often brings up curiosity and questions across friends, family members and even strangers we meet outside on the road, on public transport etc.

Next month is SANOG 39 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. SANOG is a South Asian Network Operator Group event and a good place for meeting a number of ISPs, telecom players, Ops team members of content networks, internet exchanges etc. Besides attending the conference, I will be doing a workshop on Network Automation. It will be a four-day workshop covering Containers, Ansible, Gitlab CI/CD pipeline and REST APIs for automation in the workflow.