[atlas] Reverse traceroute

Hank,

On 16/04/2024 19.44, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
> https://pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/reverse-traceroutes-help-troubleshoot-improve-visibility-of-internets-health
> 
> "Measure at least one reverse path from 39,544 Autonomous System (AS) 
> destinations, which host 92.6% of Internet users. As a comparison, RIPE 
> Atlas vantage points can measure from 4,344 AS destinations, 
> representing 67.1% of the Internet user base."

This particular metric feels highly-contrived... as if to highlight one 
specific property that their system excels at. Number of ASN doesn't 
mean that much really... a single vantage point at Comcast would account 
for 30 million customers and probably twice that many users, but not 
actually tell you much about the network for the vast majority of those 
users.

It seems like the effort is targeted at operators and not end users, 
with the selling point is to provide a win-win situation, where 
operators gain useful metrics and the researchers learn about the 
network. This would encourage operators to run their code, and the 
researchers could more easily coax them to run their tool, getting these 
impressive numbers. (I haven't read the paper of course, because 
apparently the ACM is not open access and honestly I don't feel like 
spending $15 for access.)

My understanding is that RIPE Atlas is mostly targeted at end users, not 
operators, so probably a bit harder to get probes placed, as it has no 
direct benefit for operators... and in fact could reveal details about 
their network and the quality of their service that they would not care 
to share. This is not *completely* true, as there are the RIPE Atlas 
Anchors, which I think are intended to run as infrastructure nodes, but 
mostly.

> Has anyone tried this and indeed found better visibility via their system?

I have not. It looks less flexible than Atlas, but also nice and simple!

Thanks for pointing it out.

Cheers,

--
Shane

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