Checking your Internet Connectivity with RIPE Atlas Anchors — RIPE Labs
lundi 5 octobre 2015 à 11:39GuiGui's Show - Liens
« If you monitor your external Internet connectivity, you may wonder which machine is the best to ping. Hesitate no more - you can use RIPE Atlas anchors as landmarks.
[...]
It is common practice to ping a certain machine as a landmark to verify your Internet connection. You may use a machine which belongs to you, one outside of your premises or a public Internet server. Using a public Internet server, for example Google Public DNS, is questionable. It's not your machine, it is not free to use and it may stop answering pings at any moment (this is the case with www.ripe.net and labs.ripe.net). If every small LAN pings 2001:db8:433::1 (the example IPv6 adress) every three minutes, and there are ten millions small networks doing it, 2001:db8:433::1 will receive 50 kp/s. This is reminiscent of a famous problem of many machines banging on one server.
Having public services explicitly devoted to these ping tests would be nice. There are a few such as fap.cymru.com, ping.rezopole.net or ping.ovh.net. They do not appear to be clearly documented (with usage policy), maybe because their managers do not want to attract too much attention.
But one landmark is not enough. Each landmark, even well-connected and professionally managed, can break or be unreachable. You don't wan't to receive a warning from your monitoring system at 2:00 in the morning if a remote landmark, that you do not control, went down. You need to ping N different machines, and you need to decide that there is a problem only if M of them (with M < N) are unreachable. If only there was a better way...
...but wait, there is! With RIPE Atlas anchors, you can have many pingable machines at your disposal. These servers are located in many places around the world (complete list online). Their main job is to be used as targets in measurements, typically by the RIPE Atlas probes. Using the anchors to monitor Internet connectivity is less common but very useful. »
(Permalink)
« If you monitor your external Internet connectivity, you may wonder which machine is the best to ping. Hesitate no more - you can use RIPE Atlas anchors as landmarks.
[...]
It is common practice to ping a certain machine as a landmark to verify your Internet connection. You may use a machine which belongs to you, one outside of your premises or a public Internet server. Using a public Internet server, for example Google Public DNS, is questionable. It's not your machine, it is not free to use and it may stop answering pings at any moment (this is the case with www.ripe.net and labs.ripe.net). If every small LAN pings 2001:db8:433::1 (the example IPv6 adress) every three minutes, and there are ten millions small networks doing it, 2001:db8:433::1 will receive 50 kp/s. This is reminiscent of a famous problem of many machines banging on one server.
Having public services explicitly devoted to these ping tests would be nice. There are a few such as fap.cymru.com, ping.rezopole.net or ping.ovh.net. They do not appear to be clearly documented (with usage policy), maybe because their managers do not want to attract too much attention.
But one landmark is not enough. Each landmark, even well-connected and professionally managed, can break or be unreachable. You don't wan't to receive a warning from your monitoring system at 2:00 in the morning if a remote landmark, that you do not control, went down. You need to ping N different machines, and you need to decide that there is a problem only if M of them (with M < N) are unreachable. If only there was a better way...
...but wait, there is! With RIPE Atlas anchors, you can have many pingable machines at your disposal. These servers are located in many places around the world (complete list online). Their main job is to be used as targets in measurements, typically by the RIPE Atlas probes. Using the anchors to monitor Internet connectivity is less common but very useful. »
(Permalink)