Author Archives: Varun Priolkar

Rajdhani Express first class review – An unforgettable experience

By | 6th June 2018

On my usual Goa to Delhi trips I decided to try out Rajdhani first class instead of the usual flight option. I had a spare sunday at my disposal and was tired of flying so decided to try the best that the Indian Railways had to offer. I booked a single normal first-class(1AC) ticket from… Read More »

Issues plaguing NIXI internet exchange in India

By | 23rd May 2018

Before proceeding I want to make it absolutely clear that these are my personal views only and nothing to do with my employer or their views. National Internet Exchange of India(NIXI) is an internet exchange in India, infact one of the few in the country and is fully government owned non-profit entity initially established to… Read More »

Ultimate OpenVPN setup – inter-connecting, connecting to multiple sites at once

By | 21st May 2018

I had multiple networks scattered around different places and needed a way to link all of them together. They were as follows: Work related VPNs. There were multiple VPNs to access different parts of the internal networks. Handling multiple VPN files was very cumbersome. For convinience let’s assume we have a single network here –… Read More »

Free wildcard certs with Let’s Encrypt & DNS auth ft. Route 53

By | 17th May 2018

Everyone’s favorite SSL certificate authority Let’s Encrypt recently announced support for wildcard SSL certificates on their forum here using the ACMEv2 API. Wildcard SSL certificates still cost as much as $150-300/yr on the market. Getting them for free is a huge bonus. Install Certbot Grab the Certbot tool for issuing Let’s Encrypt signed SSL certificates.… Read More »

Multi-WAN failover without session termination

By | 5th April 2018

One of the reasons why people run BGP is when reliability is of utmost importance and sessions terminating abruptly can simply be not afforded, especially in cases like VOIP. However this is an expensive proposition both cost and skill wise. There may be a middle ground between this and simple failover with multiple uplinks. That… Read More »

How to fake pings and traceroutes

By | 21st April 2017

I recently read Srijit Banerjee’s excellent article, which brought to light ugly things done by service providers to fool their customers who have grown accustomed to the ping google.com command to judge the quality of the internet. While he has strayed away from how this is done, I feel that educating people on how this… Read More »