Based in Amsterdam, NL
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I'm a system architect/research coordinator at the RIPE NCC, where I work in the science group. I'm a chemist by training, but have been working since 1998 on Internet related things, as a sysadmin, security consultant, web developer and researcher. I am interested in technology changes (like IPv6 deployment), Internet measurement, data analysis, data visualisation, sustainability and security. I'd like to bring research and operations closer together, ie. do research that is operationally relevant. When I'm not working I like to make music (electric guitar, bass and drums), do sports (swimming, (inline) skating, bouldering, soccer), and try to be a good parent.
Website: https://www.caida.org/~emile
• 25 min read
With last month’s cuts in two major Baltic Sea Internet cables now successfully repaired, and another cut having occurred in the meantime, we analyse these events and delve deeper into the question of how exactly the Internet has remained resilient.
• 10 min read
This week's Internet cable cuts in the Baltic Sea have been widely reported, even as attempts to understand their cause and impact continue. We turn to RIPE Atlas to provide a preliminary analysis of these events and ask to what extent the Internet in the region has been resilient to them.
• 5 min read
On 22-23 November 2023, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) had an outage on their Amsterdam peering platform. As this is generally considered one of the largest IXPs on the planet, we looked into this event from the perspective of RIPE Atlas to see what it had to tell us about the robustness …
• 8 min read
The peering strategy for RIS has traditionally been an open one, geared towards maximising the number of peers. But over the past couple of years we've been working with a more selective approach that reduces redundancy and cost, while also helping make sure RIS provides a diverse view of global ro…
• 21 min read
RIS is a widely used public route collector project that provides a better view of Internet routing. One thing that makes RIS unique is that it inserts observable patterns of activity into BGP through a process called beaconing. We take a look at RIS beacons and ask how to make space for more.
• 13 min read
On 2 June 2023, there was a disruption in Internet interdomain routing. We got notified of recurring resets of some routers that take care of routing between networks, due to malformed BGP packets with BGP attribute 28. Here we take a first look at the event through RIS and offer some initial ideas…
• 17 min read
In our earlier analysis of Ukraine back in March 2022, we looked at factors that contributed to the resilience of the country's Internet since the outbreak of the war. A little over a year on, we draw on data from RIPE Atlas and RIPE RIS to investigate what has changed.
• 11 min read
Speculation about Russia disconnecting or being disconnected from the wider Internet abounds. In this article, we look at the connectivity of the Russian Internet to the wider Internet and how this evolved around the Russian invasion into Ukraine and sanctions related around that.
• 5 min read
We are looking closely at what RIPE Atlas and RIPE RIS have to tell us about the state of the Ukrainian Internet. Initial observations indicate that Internet infrastructure in the country is continuing to function as the conflict unfolds.
“Thank you for this, Emil and Alun! From looking at the map you provided, it would be great to see an additional anchor in Katthammarsvik. Do you think it's worth trying to add one there?”
Thanks for the suggestion. I think that depends on the physical (cables) and logical (routing) topology near Katthammarsvik in relation to the cable landing there. In a quick search I didn't find datacentres there, which makes me think it would not be too useful. Experts on the local Internet infrastructure would probably be able to answer if it would make sense or not.
This RIPE Labs article has good information on how to avoid effects from unknown attributes showing up at your BGP routers: https://labs.ripe.net/author/berislav_todorovic/bgp-path-attribute-filtering-a-powerful-tool-to-mitigate-alien-attributes/
“Hi Emile, I remember attribute 28 showing up in several previous studies. Interesting to see it causing a problem this time! As bgpdump maintainer, I'd ask you to check out v1.6.2 or higher, since 2020 there is a '-u' flag to output unknown attributes in the short (-m) mode (helpfully submitted by Italo Cunha) - it may make your future parsing life much easier :) Kind regards, Colin”
Thanks Colin, I didn't know, and this would have speeded up my analysis if I had!
Code for looking into AS Adjacency changes is available here: https://github.com/emileaben/as-neighbour-diff
Code on how to create graphs like Figure 1 ( ie. BGP view of how networks in a country interconnect ) is available here: https://github.com/InternetHealthReport/country-as-hegemony-viz
NOG Alliance is helping out network operators in Ukraine: https://nogalliance.org/our-task-forces/keep-ukraine-connected/
An effort related to keeping Urkanian servers/websites online by the Dutch Cloud Community: https://dutchcloudcommunity.nl/community/cloud4ukraine/
We got a request for the HHI scores for other countries. I've put these in a small repo on github together with the code that generated this. repo: https://github.com/emileaben/hhi-eyeballs HHI scores for 2022-03-07 are available here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/emileaben/hhi-eyeballs/main/eyeball-hhi.2022-03-07.csv
“This is awesome work, thank you! Do you maybe have the script/notebooks/sources to reproduce this? This could be potential used for other countries.”
Hi Jenneth, The observable notebook we used for this is here: https://observablehq.com/@aguformoso/internet-outages-as-seen-by-ripe-atlas . It's a little rough around the edges, so it would be great if you could help improve it!
Thanks for your comment Maxime. I would love to see more analysis too, and the tool allows people to do this. Take for instance this thread on Twitter where Jason Livingood analyses the signals for the US: https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/1245142990336688130 If others have analysis for specific countries they want to share it would be great to have them collected, for instance as comments to this RIPE Labs post!
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