[atlas] selecting probes based on place/city?

Hi,

> I was wondering if anyone managed to come up with a method of getting a
> probe selection via the API that is based on city. The web interface
> allows this, by searching for "place", which is subsequently handled by
> the Google Maps API (I think), and which then comes back with a number
> of probes on the map, in that given place. However I need this in the
> API, which only allows to select probes based on "area, country, prefix,
> asn".

I suspect we'll never be able to fulfill *all* the various wishes about how
probe selection should work when scheduling a measurements ("I want to use
blue probes, but not the square ones, and only three per ASN, selected by
largest distance from the most sparse population of cats" kind). So we have
a decent set of features directly supported by the measurement API, and ...

> So if anyone has any ideas on how to achieve this in a dynamic way (so
> as not to have to manually build and maintain a list of probes), I'd be
> very interested in hearing about that.

... the next best thing is to use the probe API to make a probe ID
selection, and supply that ID list to the measurement API. The probe API is
pretty flexible, can do country selection as well as geocenter+radius or
geographic bounding box. So I guess it can be of use here.

See https://atlas.ripe.net/docs/rest/#probe, also the example section.

Hope this helps,
Robert