Irony note: is this not rather similar to the old UK-wide "GridMON"
service we used to run? (And got rid of in favour of PerfSonar?)
Not that I'm against this kind of thing (and I think it's a good idea,
especially considering kit value.)
Sam
On 28 January 2014 18:22, Ewan MacMahon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I said in the ops meeting that I'd put together a quick summary
> about the RIPE Atlas network probes, so here it is. The documentation
> on the RIPE site[1] is pretty good, so I'll keep this relatively
> brief[2].
>
> Firstly, 'RIPE Atlas' is an 'Atlas' in the sense that it's a 'mapping'
> project, designed to survey the internet (so nothing to do with our
> ATLAS[3]), and 'RIPE' as in the European Internet Protocol Registry,
> though the project isn't restricted to Europe and there are probes all
> round the planet.
>
> The individual probes fulfil a function similar to our PerfSonar boxes,
> in that they provide endpoints to run tests from. A key difference is
> that the tests are much more basic, and all centred around latency and
> functionality, not at all around bandwidth. Accordingly the probe
> hardware is much cheaper, being a repurposed TP-Link router[4]. There's
> a photo of our one sat on top of (and USB powered from) our PerfSonar
> boxes here:
> http://www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~macmahon/ripe_atlas/RIPE-Atlas-probe-UKI-SOUTHGRID-OX-HEP.jpg
>
> As a matter of routine a probe will do various standard measurements,
> mostly pings and traceroutes to static targets like the DNS root servers
> and dedicated RIPE Atlas Anchor nodes. By hosting a probe, you get to
> see the results of its routine measurements which given some idea of
> your connectivity to the rest of the internet.
>
> There is also a credits system - hosting a probe accumulates credits for
> as long as it's up and working, and you can then spend them on having
> the system run your own measurements, either on a one-off or recurring
> basis. For example, we had a slight question the other day whether our
> web server was unreachable from some places, so I did a quick one-off
> test of having a random 300 probes ping it. There's a screenshot of a
> graphical view of the results here:
> http://www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~macmahon/ripe_atlas/ripe-atlas-example.png
> (it turned out to be fine)
>
> Most of the probes are handed out free of charge, just by asking for one
> (which is how we and QMUL got ours). That's possible because of some
> organisations sponsoring the costs. The key advantages of being a
> sponsoring organisation are[5] that you get to see the routine
> measurements from all of the probes you've sponsored, that you get credits
> from all the probes you've sponsored (which can be spent on measurements
> using any of the probes, yours or not), and the RIPE folks add you to
> their publicity, which given that they're one of the main top-level
> internet co-ordination organisations, has good impact[6]. I don't know
> what it actually costs to sponsor a probe, but I can email the RIPE
> contact address and ask if we think we're interested, but taking the
> ~£30 retail price of the probe as a rough ballpark, spending (say)
> £10,000 (which isn't a huge amount in the context of the whole GridPP
> project) would get us about three hundred probes to distribute around
> our own sites, the rest of the UK academic network, and anywhere else
> we wanted to put them. Given that there's a total of just under five
> thousand probes currently on the whole system, I suspect we could go
> for a smaller batch if we wanted to.
>
> So, to summarise, the RIPE Atlas system has some similarities to
> PerfSonar, but in practice it fills a different niche, and they
> complement each other well. I think there is some value in our getting
> involved, and I think we should seriously look into the possibility of
> becoming a sponsor to do so.
>
> Ewan
>
> [1] https://atlas.ripe.net/
> [2] I could have been even less brief.
> [3] We can only be grateful they didn't call it 'Dirac'
> [4] One of these: http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-MR3020-Portable-Wireless-Router/dp/B00634PLTW
> [5] https://atlas.ripe.net/get-involved/become-a-sponsor/
> [6] IMPACT!
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