[atlas] My experiences with a SW probe…

Don’t know whether this is the place to share experiences but …

I installed a SW probe in Docker for Windows (the Alpine version). Turns out traceroute doesn’t work in that setup. So I installed VMware player on that PC (the latest version can coexist with Hyper-V which Docker requires) and CentOS and the binary of the probe. Of which the instructions on the Ripe Atlas site doesn’t work in the last step (yum complains no package atlasswprobe found in the repo). Manual download and install did work however. Hurrah.

Turns out traceroute in that setup only works with VMware in bridged network mode. Fine. But… all my bandwidth tests on that same box suddenly showed strange impacts… so either a working probe and accept incorrect bandwidth tests (using Ookla SpeedTest) or find another solution. Apparently the bridge in VMware and Windows on the same physical Ethernet port influence each other.

Tried the probe on OpenWRT on a small router. Works fine but I don’t want to dedicate this router to just probe work. Also the ATLAS service from init.d refuses to run the telnetd daemon at startup. Weird.

So installed VMware on a separate Windows 10 headless box (Minix Z83) that I had spare with CentOS and the binary. Runs fine. Finally.

Will kill the other two probes once I am convinced it now finally works.

Thanks Ripe for this excellent tool! A Windows version would help however :-)

Regards,

Ernst