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 .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.
The overall design of the RIPE Atlas website was upgraded, in sync with the RIPE NCC website redesign.
# 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.