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RIPE Atlas Announcements

2012-03-27: Integration with RIPE NCC Access
From now on, the user authentication behind RIPE Atlas is done through RIPE NCC Access, the RIPE NCC single sign-on system. In order to use RIPE Atlas, you'll have to log in with your single sign-on credentials.

This change allows us to offer easier access to other RIPE NCC services, as well as to provide more specialised content to RIPE NCC members in the future.

2012-03-14: UI changes and a bit more
We've deployed some changes to the UI: Beyond these changes, we've made some enhancements to the scalability of the upcoming User Defined Measurement feature and did some additional internal ("invisible to the users") modifications.
2012-02-22: Probe firmware version 4.310
This firmware contains a number of small fixes that deal with exceptional conditions. Probes should also reconnected slightly quicker after a disconnect.
2012-02-01: new UI features
We've added some new cool & useful features to the UI:
  • The probe's network usage is now visualised on the probe details page. We show both bits/sec and packets/sec, as seen on the probe's network interface. Note that these include broadcast traffic, so it most likely overestimates the actual network traffic related to the probe.
  • You can now easily look at the last traceroute(6) result of each built-in measurement: click on the link of the "Target Address" column.
  • Downloading the logs for a measurement done by your probe has been moved to the probe details page. The previous method (allowing downloads from the probes grid) did not scale well.
  • A probe host can now ask for notification (via email or an http POST) if the probe is disconnected from our network for more than 30 minutes. You can turn on this feature in the probe settings page.
  • A probe host can also ask for a monthly probe connection report, also in the probe setting page.
2011-12-22: 1024 probes online
We have passed the 1024 active probes milestone! Read more on RIPE Labs
2011-12-15: Network coverage maps and details
We've added a new, public page that lists all the IPv4/IPv6 prefixes we have up probes in, as well as their ASNs and the countries they are geolocated to. Clicking on the resources explains them in RIPEstat, while clicking on the number of probes shows where they are on the map.
2011-12-12: New firmware released: 4.280
This new firmware fixes a couple of bugs in the probe firmware, including one that prevents the probes from reconnecting to our network (for up to 3.5 days) in low memory conditions.
2011-11-22: Root DNS anycast map available
Today we've enabled the "DNS root anycast instance map" that was announced at the RIPE meeting and in a RIPE Labs article. Clicking on the "Maps" link in the menu bar (top right) leads you to a page that lists all maps we have available at the moment, including the anycast map.

As a small enhancement we also begun to link AS and prefix information to RIPEstat, to facilitate looking up more information about these resources. This is visible on the "probe details" page as well as on various maps (when clicking on individual probes).

2011-10-27: UI upgrades
Today we rolled out some new features, mostly related to the UI:
  • The probe configuration page now has a better explanation on which static configuration options were the probes able to use.
  • There's a new global map available: Comparative DNS Root Server RTT map
2011-10-10: Probe firmware version 4.270
We're again in the process of rolling out a new firmware version. This version executes much more measurements:
  • more pings to fixed destinations
  • traceroutes to fixed destinations
  • DNS root server anycast instance checks
We will add access to this data and the new visualisations to hosts over the next weeks.
In addition, this version has initial support for User Defined Measurements.
2011-09-12: Infrastructure upgrades
We're doing major upgrades to the backend infrastructure, in order to prepare the system for more resilience and to the User Defined Measurements functionality.
2011-07-04: Probe firmware version 4.030
We're in the process of rolling out a new firmware version. It enables a new feature that has been asked by members of the community: static network configuration. Using the UI, one can ask the probe to try to use static IPv4/IPv6 addresses (and DNS resolvers). If these settings don't work, the probes will fall back to using DHCP. As a byproduct, this feature also allows IPv6-only deployments.
2011-06-30: Notifications about "down" probes
We started automatically notifying hosts whose probe seems to be down for some reason. You'll get an email if your probe does not seem to be connected for an extended period of time (the current setting is five days). We hope this helps keeping probes up, especially in "ooops, sorry, I forgot!" situations.
2011-06-16: Updated probe geolocation
We've introduced some semi-randomness to the geo-coordinates when showing probes on the maps. This solves the issue of some probes not showing up on the map (or more precisely, hiding behind other probes) if there are more than one probes geolocated to the exact same spot.
2011-05-05: RTT maps for built-in measurements
We've enabled a new feature(look for "Maps" in the main menu) where you can see how each probe sees the RTT to the built-in destinations.
2011-04-20: Distribution of new Atlas probes
Our Customer Services department started to contact host applicants in order to distribute RIPE Atlas probes. We're contacting those applicants first who score high in our ranking system, i.e. whose network data and geographical location seems to be the most useful for the Atlas network.
2011-03-07: Probe DNS and uptime reporting changes
We've now enabled two features that were requested by hosts earlier:
  • The "Probe DNS" function allows you to ask for a DNS entry for you probe. Operational details:
    • The exact DNS name of your probe depends on your settings (simple or obfuscated), and can be looked up on the "Probe Conf" section of the probe status page.
    • The zone file is re-generated every 15 minutes.
    • The resulting address is the one we observe when the probe to connects to our infrastructure, so if you're using NAT then it's the public address of the NAT device. Currently it's either IPv4 or IPv6, but not both. We'll add the "other address" too in the future.
  • The probe uptime section has more details. It now contains:
    • Relative uptime for the last week and month, and for the full lifetime.
    • The source IP address of the individual connections.
    • The amount of up- and downtime (in days/hours/minutes), for each connection.
2011-02-09: New UI design
The overall design of the RIPE Atlas website was upgraded, in sync with the RIPE NCC website redesign.
2011-02-07: Probe firmware version 4.020
The new firmware version enables the use of a second registration server (woolsey.atlas.ripe.net). All probes are expected to upgrade automatically in the coming days.
2011-01-11: New UI features
We've added some changes to the UI. From now on upon registering a new probe, or changing its attributes (from the probe status page) the host can set the following additional information:
  • Router type: optional, describes the router/NAT model you have, mainly in a home installation. This information could be useful for us to correlate weird probe behavior across similar router models.
  • Allowed bandwidth: it's not used yet, but you can imagine the future purpose for it :)
  • DNS options: this has been asked by some of you before. By default it's off. If you set it to "simple" then your probe will have a probe-xxxx.probes.atlas.ripe.net DNS entry. If you set it to "obfuscated" then your probe will have a <something random looking>.probes.atlas.ripe.net DNS entry. We'll activate this feature soon.
  • Public: you can make your probe visible to everyone, which means that all Atlas users will see the probe in their probe list (with role "Viewer"), and they will be able to see the measurement details on the probe status page. Consider this an experimental feature -- we have to see if it's useful or not.

More information

There is more information on the FAQs page. If you have a question that's not answered there, please send an email to atlas@ripe.net.