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.
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
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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