[atlas] [ripe.net #1133019] Re: Your RIPE Atlas Probe (ID: 16784) is not connected to our network

Hi Daniel,

On 2014/08/01 10:33 , Daniel Suchy wrote:
> It's surprising, that you can't manage probe remotelly when it isn't
> "connected" (even you can directly reach it on L3). Technically, probe
> runs on Linux, so you can have SSH daemon with restricted IP access
> running here (listenning daemon has minimal performance overhead) - by
> current "behavior" you simply loose any way to diagnose problem - and
> dependence of established tunnel is another layer, which can fail...

Always having an ssh port open is a security risk. And it doesn't do
anything for probes behind NAT.

> As stated before - simple rebooting is just a *workaround* of any issue,
> not a solution (but it seems that's your basic recomendation).

Yes. Because the behavior of your probe is very rare. You can't just
code for every special situation.

> I think you should work on improvements on probe diagnostics in such
> cases - new hardware versions of probes seems to be more problematic
> compared to older probes, as I can see also on atlas mailing list. I
> remember, that I had to plug out/in USB flash as some step with probe
> before (also your recomended "solution").

Getting the probe to reflash its USB stick is a cost effective solution
from our point of view. It usually solves problems without requiring any
effort from our site.

> Also on probe should run some kind of watchdog, which reboots probe in
> case of similar problem automatically - probably it doesn't run now...

The version 1 and 2 probes have a watchdog. That was an endless sort of
trouble.

Note, the probes are run in such a way that it takes a minimal amount of
time to manage a network that consists of thousands of probes. If we
spot any patterns that we try to accommodate that. However, some probes
just behave in unexpected ways. We can't really do much about that.

Philip