Hank, On 16/04/2024 19.44, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
https://pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/reverse-traceroutes-help-troubleshoot...
"Measure at least one reverse path from 39,544 Autonomous System (AS) destinations, which host 92.6% of Internet users. As a comparison, RIPE Atlas vantage points can measure from 4,344 AS destinations, representing 67.1% of the Internet user base."
This particular metric feels highly-contrived... as if to highlight one specific property that their system excels at. Number of ASN doesn't mean that much really... a single vantage point at Comcast would account for 30 million customers and probably twice that many users, but not actually tell you much about the network for the vast majority of those users. It seems like the effort is targeted at operators and not end users, with the selling point is to provide a win-win situation, where operators gain useful metrics and the researchers learn about the network. This would encourage operators to run their code, and the researchers could more easily coax them to run their tool, getting these impressive numbers. (I haven't read the paper of course, because apparently the ACM is not open access and honestly I don't feel like spending $15 for access.) My understanding is that RIPE Atlas is mostly targeted at end users, not operators, so probably a bit harder to get probes placed, as it has no direct benefit for operators... and in fact could reveal details about their network and the quality of their service that they would not care to share. This is not *completely* true, as there are the RIPE Atlas Anchors, which I think are intended to run as infrastructure nodes, but mostly.
Has anyone tried this and indeed found better visibility via their system?
I have not. It looks less flexible than Atlas, but also nice and simple! Thanks for pointing it out. Cheers, -- Shane