Informatics has been selected to host one of the first five sponsored RIPE atlas anchors! The other four sites are in Macedonia, France, Romania and Albania.
The RIPE atlas system consists of several thousand network “probes” dotted around the world. These perform a variety of standard and user-instigated measurements of hosts and services on the Internet, for research and post hoc investigations. Informatics has hosted one of these probes for a couple of years now. Anchors are essentially larger and more capable probes, located at sites with good stable connectivity, which can be used as the target for other probes’ queries.
As a result of hosting these systems we earn “credits” which can be use to “pay for” our own measurements. We have spare credits, and should have many more as a result of hosting the anchor probe. If you think it would be useful for your own work to make use of the atlas system’s capabilities, please get in touch and we’ll see what we can set up.
And, of course, it’s also good publicity for Informatics across the network operations community, and it’s a way for us to do our bit in a small way towards the smooth running of the Internet at large.