Competitions
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The RIPE Labs Article Competition - RIPE 92

Competition closed

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The RIPE Labs article competition for RIPE 92 is closed and the results are in...

The winning article is Ukraine as a Laboratory of Internet Resilience by Eliza Rohotska and Solomiia Yaremenko - a timely, insightful look at the concept of resilience as it applies to the Internet and the people who keep it running under extreme conditions. We look forward to greeting Eliza at RIPE 92!

Runner-up prize goes to José Mª Rivadeneyra for When iBGP Full Mesh Is Actually Unnecessary, a clear and practical contribution on BGP design.

Many thanks to all entrants for their contributions, and congratulations to the winners!

If you want to learn more about the competition, including a more specific list of what we look from the best RIPE Labs articles, is available on the RIPE Labs Competition Rules page.


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Testing IXP Configurations Without Breaking Production: A Digital Twin Approach

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Tommaso Caiazzi

7 min read

Configuration mistakes at an IXP can have immediate impact. Building on the earlier IXP Digital Twin project, this article presents a new dashboard that enables operators to recreate production environments, validate routing state, and test member onboarding off production.

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175 Please read the article before liking.
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Make This One Change to Prevent Routing Loops in Your Network

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Maynard Koch

5 min read

Routing loops can trap packets between routers, preventing them from reaching their destination. In some cases, routers even duplicate looping packets, amplifying traffic and threatening Internet stability. We look at how this happens and how operators can prevent it.

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138 Please read the article before liking.
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Beyond the Network View: DNS-Driven Application Visibility

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Danny Lachos

6 min read

Network operators often lack visibility into which applications drive their traffic. We present an open-source DNS-based correlation method that enriches NetFlow and BGP data with application and CDN information. This enables a shift from a network-centric to an application-oriented view of traffic.

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45 Please read the article before liking.
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When iBGP Full Mesh Is Actually Unnecessary

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José Mª Rivadeneyra

9 min read

A common misconception is that iBGP requires a full mesh or alternatives such as route reflectors. In reality, full mesh is not a protocol requirement, but a design choice that may be unnecessary and even undesirable in stub ASes and small ISPs.

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47 Please read the article before liking.
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Operating a Data Center with a Small Team: Engineering Lessons from Central Asia

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Furug Rasuli

10 min read

Managing ~600 infrastructure devices with a three-person team demands careful design choices. Based on experience in Central Asia, this article examines how standardisation, observability, and operational discipline support reliability at scale.

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23 Please read the article before liking.
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RootViz: New Root DNS Reachability Dashboard

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Giovane Moura

6 min read

In this guest post, the team at SIDN Labs introduce a new dashboard built on RIPE Atlas data that lets the community visualise real-time measurement results and explore how probes reach the Internet’s root DNS servers.

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50 Please read the article before liking.
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When ToR Instability Collapses Cross-Rack Redundancy Without Breaching SLA

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Ruslan Seyidov

7 min read

This article examines a two-rack deployment where ToR instability quietly collapsed redundancy while SLA metrics remained within bounds, revealing how service-level monitoring can mask structural risk.

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28 Please read the article before liking.
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Forward to Hell? On Misusing Transparent DNS Forwarders For Amplification Attacks

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Maynard Koch

10 min read

DNS infrastructure is infamous for facilitating reflective amplification attacks. Countermeasures such as server shielding, access control, rate limiting and protocol restrictions have improved the situation, but DNS-based reflective amplification attacks persist. Focusing on the threat vector intr…

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163 Please read the article before liking.
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Ukraine as a Laboratory of Internet Resilience

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Eliza Rohotska

14 min read

Ukraine’s Internet has not collapsed under invasion - it has adapted. This article examines what that reveals about the concept of resilience in the context of Internet infrastructure and the people who keep the networks running.

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184 Please read the article before liking.
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