[atlas]DNS records for the probes' internet address

* Emile Aben

> We can see if there is broader interest for this feature and make it
> an opt-in (checkbox in the GUI). One thing to be careful about here
> is that having all probes in easy to guess hostnames, will make it
> easy to DoS part of the infrastructure. Doing it as an opt-in, will
> make sure that only the people that want/need this feature will
> enable it, and if that is a sufficiently low fraction of total, it
> makes it unlikely as a DoS target.

You could also of course make the hostname harder to guess, generating
some random UID that's part of the FQDN and that each host have to look
up in the Atlas dashboard manually, and set up easier-to-remember CNAMEs
perhaps.

By the way - when it comes to secrecy for privacy reasons, I'd
personally very much like to make my probes as public as possible
(doesn't necessarily have to include listing the IP address if you're
concerned about DoS attacks).  Because one way I can imagine the Atlas
projects being immensely useful to network operators world-wide is if it
can be used as a kind of massive public looking glass.  Someone could
then go to the dashboard and query for a listing of probes dependent on
various parameters, such as in autonomous system #N or in
country/city/continent Foo, select the probes he wants, and then request
an arbitrary traceroute or ping to be run from those probes. Heck, I'd
even give it a BGP feed people could query like that too, but I assume
it doesn't have the horsepower to deal with that...

I know I would certainly allow the probes I host to be used like that
and hope that as many others as possible did so too.  I have no idea of
how of I have tried to debug a connectivity problem from some random
source network and have unsuccessfully searched for a looking glass that
could help me with it, but it's _a lot_ of times.  I'm sure I'm not
alone about that, and if people see that Atlas provides such an
awesomely useful service I'm sure that would in turn make them more
interested in participating by hosting or sponsoring probes of their own.

> You can force the upgrade by rebooting (unplugging and replugging)
> your probe.

HA!  Trying to cheat me out of my iPad, are you?  That's low, Emile,
low...your diabolical tricks won't work on me!  =D

Best regards,
-- 
Tore Anderson
Redpill Linpro AS - http://www.redpill-linpro.com/
Tel: +47 21 54 41 27