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.
#facebookdown? What Internet Measurement Data Shows
While at this point it is still unclear what exactly happened at Facebook this morning (27 January), we collect data on the Internet control plane (BGP) and data plane that allows us to provide some insight into what happened with Facebook's connectivity to the rest of the Internet.
Visualising IPv4 and IPv6 Tweets
This time we explored Twitter feed visualisation with CartoDB, a map visualisation tool.
Distribution of RIPE Atlas Probes
As the RIPE Atlas network continues to grow, it's useful for ambassadors and potential probes hosts to easily see where we already have probes deployed and where we'd like more probes installed. We created a few useful maps to help with this.
Propagation of Longer-than-/24 IPv4 Prefixes
Under ARIN's Number Resource Policy Manual (NRPM) Section 4.10, the IPv4 address block 23.128/10 is reserved for allocations and assignments dedicated to facilitate IPv6 deployment. The maximum allocation size is a /24; the minimum allocation size is a /28. There has been much discussion on the NAN…
Time Warner Cable Outage
The Time Warner Cable network suffered an outage on 27 August 2014 between approximately 9:40 and 10:55 UTC. We looked at some interesting details of this outage using RIS and RIPE Atlas.
512K-mageddon?
A week after the 512K-routes problem started making waves, we took a look at the global effects to see what impact it had. Spoiler: Not much.
Internet Traffic During the World Cup 2014
The World Cup is one of the most watched events on the planet, and we've been looking at traffic changes at Internet Exchange Points during the matches in Brazil at World Cup 2014. The final part of our analysis is now available, with a look at what happened during the final four matches of the tou…
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How RIPE Atlas Helped Wikipedia Users
Engineers from the Wikimedia Foundation and the RIPE NCC recently collaborated on a project to measure the latency of Wikimedia sites for users worldwide. Together, we identified ways to decrease latency and improve performance for users around the world.
A RIPE Atlas View of Internet Meddling in Turkey
In RIPE Atlas we see latencies to Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS resolver service drop in Turkey. We expect this is due to hijacking of the 8.8.8.8 service. Our measurements show a timeline of these events. Note that even when the Twitter ban had been lifted, RIPE Atlas still saw fake 8.8.8.8 DNS service…
CAPIF 2: The Road to Interconnection
From 19-20 September, network operators, local IXPs, peering coordinators, Internet researchers and government officials will meet at CAPIF 2 to build a more diverse interconnection environment in Central Asia, Iran, and beyond. To prepare, we’ve been examining changes in local interconnection and …
Unlocking the Power of Internet Alarms Correlation and Aggregated Reports
In this article, Mohamed presents his Google Summer of Code project that correlates and aggregates alarm data to detect real-world Internet outages. His project integrates data from IHR, GRIP, and IODA, visualising BGP hijacking, delays, and outages for improved real-time monitoring.
Intercept and Inject: DNS Response Manipulation in the Wild
In November 2021, Internet users from Mexico lost access to whatsapp.net and facebook.com. By the time the event was reported, the underlying problem had already gone unnoticed for quite some time. Here, we present key takeaways from our analysis of the event - carried out with RIPE Atlas - and we …
Plug and Plot: Reusable Visualisations for AS-Hegemony Data
This article presents a set of open-source tools - “reusable visualisations” - that extend the AS hegemony visualisations provided by the Internet Health Report. Users can directly use the online tools or embed the IHR data on their own posts, webpages, or Observable HQ notebooks.
240/4 As Seen by RIPE Atlas
In this article we use data from RIPE Atlas probes to investigate the usage of 240/4, a block of IPv4 addresses 'reserved for future use', formally known as Class E in the wild.
Spring and Summer Events Season 2022
The events season has started! This article is an invitation to people from across many communities, whatever your role or level of experience, to come and participate in workshops, conferences, camps, lectures, festivals, and more.
Detecting DNS Root Manipulation
In 2021, reports emerged that hosts in Mexico were unable to reach whatsapp.net. It was determined that middleboxes were to blame, intercepting the queries to the root instance hosted in China and sending a bogus reply. This article investigates the prevalence of middleboxes using RIPE Atlas probes.
NOGs on NOGs
The RIPE NCC recently held two Open House events to bring together people who help organise NOGs, which bring together people who help operate the Internet in particular parts the world.
Facebook Down and Out in BGPlay
Following the Facebook outage that took place on 4 October, we saw people looking to BGPlay to get a better view of what went on. Here's a look at what the RIPEstat visualisation has to show us about the event in question.
Looking Inside Outages with RIPE Atlas
RIPE Atlas probes actively measure Internet connectivity through a variety of measurement types. In this article, we take a closer look at what probes can tell us about outages.
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!
“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 :) )
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