[afnog] Cannot access networks in Mali from Indian NKN, AWS us-east-1d zone, others

[xenophon\+afnog]

Hi all,

We need help escalating this issue within Sotelma or contacting
Sotelma's upstream ISPs.

We operate an EC2 instance in the us-east-1d zone as a SMTP relay and
spam filter for several networks in Africa and Asia.  For some time this
instance ran without any problems, but recently we have had issues
delivering mail to some recipients, as the instance's public IPv4
address was listed as being dynamically assigned and because reverse DNS
pointed to amazonaws.com, not our DNS domain.  To correct these
problems, we allocated an Elastic IP address and assigned it to the
instance (107.21.211.194), then requested the configuration of reverse
DNS via
https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/ec2
-email-limit-rdns-request.  Unfortunately, while reverse DNS has been
configured correctly, the limits removed, and the EIP delisted from
various dynamic-IP blacklists, our instance is now unable to communicate
with anything in the network block ML-ALIOUNE-20001030 (217.64.96.0/20),
BGP4 AS21271 - and vice versa.

Likewise, in November 2012 we moved our service desk web app from
Washington, DC, to our private data center in Bamako, Mali.  Our ISP for
this data center is Sotelma and has IP addresses in the 217.64.96.0/20
network.  Since then our staff in India have been unable to access the
service desk.  Further testing shows this to be the same problem as with
our EC2 instance - hosts within the Indian National Knowledge Network
(NKN) also cannot communicate with anything in the 217.64.96.0/20
network.

Note that we are able to access sites in Mali that connect to the
Internet via other Malian ISPs - Afribone and Orange.  Furthermore, this
connectivity problem only affects some of our networks.  For example, we
have no problems connecting to the ML-ALIOUNE-20001030 netblock from
Time Warner Cable or Cincinnati Bell (Fuse) in Cincinnati, Ohio; from
the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC; or from our
research sites in Uganda.  Additional testing using Hurricane Electric's
looking glass shows similar results - some traceroutes complete
successfully while others don't.

I have posted the traceroutes at
https://web.irtnog.org/~xenophon/pastebin/traceroutes-to-sotelma.zip.

At this point we have contacted Sotelma in Mali regarding this issue -
and haven't gotten a response from their technical support.  However,
the problem may lie with Sonatel (Sotelma's upstream ISP) or France
Telecom (Sonatel's upstream ISP).  If possible, we would like help
escalating this issue within Sotelma or help contacting Sonatel or
France Telecom.

Best wishes,
Matthew

-- 
I FIGHT FOR THE USERS