Insights from RIPE Atlas Probe Disconnections
There are all kinds of reasons why RIPE Atlas probes might become disconnected. So, even though we'd like all probes to be connected all the time, disconnects can also tell us a useful story.
Emile Aben
Based in Amsterdam, NL
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About the author
Based in Amsterdam, NL
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.
Bugfixing IPv6 Deployment Statistics
We found a bug in a dataset that we've been producing for years.
DNS Root Server Transparency: K-Root, Anycast and More
The RIPE NCC is operating K-root, one of the 13 DNS root servers. In this article we shed some light on the operational policies of K-root to clarify possible misunderstandings about how it is operated.
Large BGP Communities - Largely Accepted Now?
Large BGP Communities are an addition to BGP that solves a communication problem between networks that want to use 32-bit AS Numbers. We measured how Large BGP Communities behave "in the wild" and if they create any problems.
Internet Access Disruption In Turkey - July 2016
With the attempted coup in Turkey, reports went out about social media being throttled and/or blocked. We analysed data about this that we collected with RIPE Atlas and the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI).
Broadband Services and Infrastructure Mapping
I attended a conference on Broadband Services and Infrastructure Mapping, which I think had some interesting content for RIPE Labs readers.
Measuring More Internet with RIPE Atlas
RIPE Atlas collects a lot of measurements. But how much of the Internet are we actually measuring? We had a sense that with a limited amount of extra load on the system, we could dramatically increase the number of router IPs seen on a given day in RIPE Atlas - and that means measuring more of the …
Does the Internet Route Around Damage? A Case Study Using RIPE Atlas
The Internet has a robust infrastructure that was designed to route around damage. But how well does it do this? We use RIPE Atlas to look at how large-scale disruptions in the Internet's core infrastructure affect end-to-end connectivity on the Internet.
A Tale of BGP Collectors and Customer Cones
When operators and researchers use data from BGP route collectors such as RIS and Route Views, it's not easy to tell if a path announced to a collector is an ISP's customer cone, an internal route, or one learned from peering or transit. In this post we look at what information we can currently get…
RPKI Test
How can you quickly figure out if a network you are using is dropping invalid Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) BGP announcements? You can do so by opening up a browser and visiting our RPKI test web page.
BGP Zombies
When withdrawing an IP prefix from the Internet, an origin network sends BGP withdraw messages, which are expected to propagate to all BGP routers that hold an entry for that IP prefix in their routing table. Yet network operators occasionally report issues where routers maintain routes to IP prefi…
Measuring Paths in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Based on RIPE Atlas measurements, we can illustrate if paths between different networks in a given country stay in that country. We can also provide sketches of interconnections between networks in that country. In this article we look at the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
An API for Summarising Events in RIPE Atlas RTT Time Series
This post describes the result of an internship of a month of integrating an experimental data analysis method into RIPE Atlas.
Detection of Peering Infrastructure Outages Based on BGP Communities
Networks rely increasingly on Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and carrier-neutral interconnection facilities that enable dense localised peering connectivity to handle the massive traffic exchange between clients and servers.
FOSDEM 2018: What Happens in Brussels (Ends Up on the Internet)
FOSDEM is an opportunity for developers of free and open-source software from around the world to meet in “real life”, every February, for one weekend in Brussels. Among all the conversations and experiences are many topics relevant for the RIPE community.
Detecting Network Outages with RIPE Atlas
This post describes a technique to detect bursty TCP disconnections, and how it can be used on RIPE Atlas data to better detect outages in the Internet.
Talking Traffic at TMA 2017
Last week, the Network Traffic, Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA) took place in Maynooth, Ireland. A full week was scheduled, featuring a PhD school across Monday and Tuesday, the Mobile Network Measurements (MNM) workshop on Tuesday, and the main conference from Wednesday to Friday. We wer…
RIPE Atlas Coverage in Eyeball Networks
In this article we present a prototype web portal, which demonstrates the deployment of RIPE Atlas probes within eyeball networks based on Internet user population estimates per Autonomous System Number (ASN) per country.
BGP Table Fragmentation: What & Who?
BGP routing table growth is one of the major Internet scaling issues, and prefix deaggregation is thought to be a major contributor to table growth. In this work we quantify the fragmentation of the routing table by the type of IP prefix. We observe that the proportion of deaggregated prefixes has …
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!
“One may assume that, if some people delayed the changes, other people rushed in to adapt the networks to the increased load? Both behaviour may explain why the change rate is more or less the same?”
I think it would be interesting to dig into this data deeper indeed. I looked at splitting this out per country a bit, but could try figure out if there are trends in the sets of ASNs in this timeseries. Would you be willing to look at this? My colleague Vesna is doing a virtual hackathon around Internet and Corona ( https://labs.ripe.net/Members/becha/hackathons-in-the-time-of-corona ), I'd love it if we could collaborate around this. Let me or Vesna know, or hop on to the conf calls, Mon 2pm UTC ( 3pm Paris timezone :) )
“Ghost routes: https://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/what/”
I've added a reference to the different names 'stuck routes' and 'ghost routes' for this phenomenon at the beginning of the post. Thanks for the pointer!
“Interested in repeating this analysis for 2018 world cup?”
Hi Dan, we have no plans of repeating this analysis this time. This type of signal is still there, see for instance https://twitter.com/search?q=%40ohohlfeld%20%23worldcup&src=typd for a couple of graphs that show the impact in various places.
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