[atlas] some thoughts and question regrding probe "stability"

Hu Philip + Team,

Philip Homburg wrote:

first of all thanks for investigating!

[...]
> More like, the controller 'pings' the probe every 20 seconds and after 3
> missed responses the connection is terminated.
> 
> And for the Atlas system as a whole, that works. But the goal of the
> Atlas system is not to have a probe connected as long as possible.

That's fully understood.

I'm still having a couple of questions :-)

1) if I do understand correctly, the decision to label a probe "disconnected"
   is made by the associateed collector, based on pings? (btw. - "real" pings
   on ICMP or internal over the channel?)

2) if that's the case, is there an easy way to find out to which collector a
   probe is "assigned"? (is this static or dynamic?)

3) if a probe, in particular an anchor, gets updated with a new firmware, is
   it possible that the ethernet IF does *not* go down? (Note, the 6009 is an
   old, big, beta box! Is there a difference with the new soekris probes?)

> Philip

Just to be very clear, I just want to understand how to interpret things,
'cause I already had an issue with one of my v1 probes, and in the end it
turned out that the USB power feed was just boarderline, problem gone after
replacement.

And as an ISP and backbone operator, seeing stuff as "down" or "disconnected",
without a good explanation, starts to itch after a while :-)

All the best, have a nice weekend,
Wilfried.