RIPE Atlas: Hurricane Sandy and How the Internet Routes Around Damage
• 13 min read
In this article we look at some of the effects Hurricane Sandy had on the Internet data plane, as we can see them in traceroutes done by RIPE Atlas.
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.
RIPE Atlas - Superstorm Sandy
• 3 min read
After causing lots of damage in the Caribbean, superstorm Sandy is having a devastating effect on the US East Coast. We looked at the RIPE Atlas network to find out what effects this superstorm has on the Internet. Below are some preliminary results of what we saw.
RIPE Atlas - A Case Study of AAAA Filtering
• 6 min read
At the recent RIPE Meeting, the question was raised whether Internet users would see significant filtering of AAAA DNS queries or replies. We used RIPE Atlas measurements to provide an answer to this question.
IPv6 RIPEness - More Stars
• 9 min read
IPv6 RIPEness helped in creating awareness and got people into action with regards to their first steps towards deploying IPv6 in the RIPE NCC service region. Up until now IPv6 RIPEness didn't measure actual IPv6 deployment. In this article we propose a measure (a "5th star"), which attempts to mea…
Top Ten Olympic Winners and Indicators of IPv6 Preparedness
• 4 min read
Olympic fever didn't escape us here at the RIPE NCC!
RIPE Atlas - A Case Study of IPv6 /48 Filtering
• 9 min read
In this article I look at four different IPv6 destinations in different BGP set-ups and how these are seen by RIPE Atlas probes. This reveals some differences in reachability for the different networks, likely due to BGP route filtering. We see roughly 1% out of ~500 RIPE Atlas probes that can't re…
World IPv6 Launch - Lasting Effect on Content
• 2 min read
Now that World IPv6 Launch is weeks behind us it's interesting to look at what long-lasting effects it had.
Measuring IPv6 Connectivity with RIPE Atlas - How Do Others See Your IPv6 Network?
• 10 min read
We've enabled RIPE NCC members to do IPv6-traceroutes from all RIPE Atlas probes to IPv6 destinations. Until now they could get the raw analysis results (text/JSON representations of traceroute results) for analysis. In this article we present a first experimental analysis and visualisation of the …
Measuring World IPv6 Launch - Comparing IPv4 and IPv6 Performance
• 7 min read
Following on from last year's during World IPv6 Day, we again looked at relative performance of IPv4 and IPv6 from the measurements we conducted. In this article we describe the methodology and the show the results of these measurements.
Changes to RIPE Atlas Raw Data Structure
• 3 min read
With the introduction of a new firmware version for RIPE Atlas probes, the structure of the measurement results will be changing. Anyone making use of the raw results is advised to read about these upcoming changes and to subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe to our mailing list to be notified of …
Network Delays in Times of Corona
• 3 min read
As part of the Internet health hackathon, we studied RIPE Atlas delay signals before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's what we found.
After the Quake in Croatia
• 5 min read
After the recent earthquake in Croatia we looked at RIPE Atlas and RIS data to visualise the impact a large event like this can have on the resilience of the Internet.
What’s the Deal with IPv6 Link-Local Addresses?
• 8 min read
...or, how RIPE Atlas measurement data just got a little bit more complex. Some people say IPv6 is "96 more bits, no magic". And while this is true for most network operators, if you're a RIPE Atlas system programmer, you can run into interesting situations. In this article, we described how link-l…
RPKI Test
• 2 min read
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
• 8 min read
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
• 3 min read
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
• 6 min read
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
• 8 min read
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)
• 6 min read
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
• 7 min read
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.
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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