[atlas] Querying popular domains with RIPE Atlas

should be fine from uk perspective, note you need to be careful about dos protection issues when probes behind provider mobile nat

Colin

> On 7 Feb 2017, at 14:16, Chris Amin <camin at ripe.net> wrote:
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> As you are probably aware, DNSMON* and RIPE Atlas built-in**
> measurements are often used when analysing outages and other issues with
> important DNS services, particularly the root zone servers. These
> measurements do not provide a direct indication of the impact on actual
> end-user experience because they involve directly querying authoritative
> name servers, thereby ignoring the effects of having multiple
> authoritative name servers as well as caching local recursive resolvers.
> 
> To improve upon our DNS monitoring, we will initiate two built-in DNS
> measurements from all RIPE Atlas probes that use the probes' default
> resolvers instead of authoritative name servers. The first measurement
> will query for random top-level domains with the intention of avoiding
> caches and therefore hitting at least one root name server. The second
> measurement will query for popular domain names, with the intention of
> hitting caches where appropriate and getting an idea of the true impact
> on users.
> 
> As a starting point for the second measurement, we will use a recent
> snapshot of the global top 50 visited sites according to the Alexa top
> sites list***, which combines unique visitors and individual page views
> in its calculations. Probes will cycle through these domains, querying
> for a different A record every 10 minutes.
> 
> Since DNS queries containing these domains will be made from every
> connected RIPE Atlas probe, we would like to ask for feedback on whether
> querying the DNS for any of these domains could pose legal or political
> problems for probe hosts in certain parts of the world. I have also
> included the next 25 most popular domains below, which will be used to
> fill any gaps caused by removing items from the main list.
> 
> Kind regards,
> Chris Amin
> RIPE NCC
> 
> * https://atlas.ripe.net/dnsmon/
> ** https://atlas.ripe.net/docs/built-in/
> ***
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_most_popular_websites&oldid=762455912
> 
> Provisional 50 domains to query
> ===============================
> google.com.
> youtube.com.
> facebook.com.
> baidu.com.
> wikipedia.org.
> yahoo.com.
> google.co.in.
> amazon.com.
> qq.com.
> google.co.jp.
> live.com.
> taobao.com.
> vk.com.
> twitter.com.
> instagram.com.
> hao123.com.
> sohu.com.
> sina.com.cn.
> reddit.com.
> google.de.
> linkedin.com.
> tmall.com.
> yahoo.co.jp.
> weibo.com.
> google.fr.
> 360.cn.
> google.co.uk.
> google.ru.
> google.com.br.
> yandex.ru.
> ebay.com.
> bing.com.
> msn.com.
> google.it.
> soso.com.
> t.co.
> wordpress.com.
> google.es.
> microsoft.com.
> tumblr.com.
> aliexpress.com.
> blogspot.com.
> netflix.com.
> amazon.co.jp.
> ok.ru.
> google.com.hk.
> stackoverflow.com.
> google.ca.
> google.com.mx.
> imgur.com.
> 
> Next 25 most popular domains, excluding pornography
> ===================================================
> apple.com.
> Naver.com.
> mail.ru.
> imdb.com.
> popads.net.
> onclickads.net.
> office.com.
> google.co.kr.
> github.com.
> pinterest.com.
> paypal.com.
> tianya.cn.
> google.com.tw.
> google.com.tr.
> google.com.au.
> diply.com.
> amazon.de.
> google.co.id.
> microsoftonline.com.
> onclckds.com.
> twitch.tv.
> adobe.com.
> amazon.co.uk.
> wikia.com.
> cnzz.com.
>