Yesterday, Job Snijders presented the NLNOG RING at the RIPE 65 Plenary meeting. In his presentation he illustrated how fast the RING has grown (137 hosts in 123 networks and 27 countries at this moment) and, more importantly, how powerful the RING has become. Various tools make debugging network related problems a lot easier. In his presentation Job also demonstrated the new (currently beta) AMP tool, which can be used to detect various problems like packetloss, MTU issues and routability problems.

Job’s presentation was recorded, you can view it here. Of course, the slides are available for download as well.

If you’re interested in joining the NLNOG RING, please read the requirements on the main page and fill in the application form.

People visiting RIPE65 please visit the NLNOG RING BoF drink on Thursday at 18.00h. Location is tentatively Grand Ballroom IV-V but may change, please check the RIPE BoF page for confirmation.

In addition to the ring-user accessible SSH interface, there is now a gorgeous intuitive public web interface available for the NLNOG RING Looking Glass.

You can find it here: http://lg.ring.nlnog.net/

A particularly nice feature is BGPMap, which generates a graph based on current routing information, example:

http://lg.ring.nlnog.net/prefix_bgpmap/lg01/ipv6?q=www.snijders-it.nl

I’d like to thank Mehdi ABAAKOUK from tetaneutral.net for the excellent bird-lg software.

If you want to setup a peering session with the looking glass, drop us a line, for more information about the looking glass go to toolbox/looking-glass.

Dear All,

We would like to share the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious results of our fund-raising effort with you!

Some background: In February 2012 we started a fundraiser to ensure the RING will have ample processing power for the next phase. Over the last 1.5 years the RING has grown to over one hundred nodes, and this was reaching the limitations of the current support systems. We are happy to announce these scalability problems are now a thing of the past!

We have raised a total of EUR 2200, brought together by the following generous organisations (listed in alphabetical order):

• A2B Internet BV (NL)
• amazon.com (IE)
• Association tetaneutral.net (FR)
• BIT BV (NL)
• Duocast BV (NL)
• LCHost (UK)
• Nedzone Internet BV (NL)
• [PCExtreme BV](http://www.pcextreme.nl/">PCExtreme BV) (NL)
• Previder BV (NL)
• Snijders IT (NL)
• Solido Networks ApS (DK)
• Triple IT BV (NL)

In addition, the following participants made significant non-monetary donations (listed in alphabetical order):

• Amazon (virtual machines, IE)
• Atrato IP Networks (1 dedicated server, DE)
• BIT (colocation, NL)
• Ebay Classifieds Group (hardware, NL)
• Leaseweb (1 dedicated server, NL)
• PCExtreme (colocation, NL)

This brings us to a total of 5 servers dedicated to management, staging and other services, and two additional (virtual) servers for data crunching!

During the next couple of weeks we will be using the donated funds to purchase hardware, and/or upgrade the donated servers. We will report back to this list on how the different donations were put to use.

We expect the first new master server to go online before the end of this month!

We would like to express our gratitude to all parties that have made donations, and are helping us to make the RING a continued success.

I’m very happy to announce that the NLNOG RING Project has a shiny new logo designed by Rayne Leroux. The logo is based on ideas from our community: the orange color symbolizes the Dutch roots of the project, the dots represent the distributed nodes and the ring shape emphasizes one of our core values: cooperation.

Now that we have obtained visually pleasing eye-candy maybe it’s time to start thinking about a tshirt? :-)

One of the nice features of the ring is the ability to view routing information from a large (and growing!) number of sources all around te world. We can combine this information to create cool things, like graphs which show the similarities and differences in traceroutes towards a common destination. This is exactly what ring-trace does. More detailed information on how to use ring-trace can be found on the Toolbox page.

Here are a few examples of graphs generated by ring-trace which show some interesting things:

The traces towards www.apple.com show indications on how Apple implemented global loadbalancing. The trace towards www.telstra.net is a nice example of a host “far away”, which gives us some indications of the transit providers used by various networks. The traces towards www.arin.net show a somewhat similar picture. The www.ripe.net show some IPv6 traces with ‘broken’ hops in it.

ring-trace can be downloaded here. It requires graphviz and python-dnspython packages on Ubuntu. Bug reports, fixes and suggestions for additional code are welcome of course, as well as graphs of the most awesome traces around the world.

A map showing the geographical location of all servers in the ring has been added to the Participants page. A larger version can be found here.

UPDATE: Due to scalability issues with the smokeping master/slave architecture we had to abandon this type of measurements in early 2013.

A smokeping Master/Slave setup has been created to graph latency between all nodes thus graphing nodes in context of a torus. With this smokeping setup problems on the Dutch internet exchanges such as AMS-IX or NL-IX are easily made visible. Also malfunctioning route-servers can be spotted.

Here is a sample image:

Please visit the NLNOG RING Smokeping

In december 2010 a few people gather together to create a more organized way of providing shell access to other network operators in the Dutch ISP scene. After a few days of hard work and mastering puppet we now can install, update and configure machines participants make available to the project in a few minutes.

Now, only a month later already 10 organisations have joined the project! Founding members include: BIT, Cambrium, ColoClue, Duocast, Easyhosting, Interconnect, InTouch, WideXS and XLSHosting.

I am looking forward to seeing this project grow and become an essential tool for network debugging in the Netherlands.