On Sat, 23 Aug 2025 at 12:46, Richter, Robert via ripe-atlas <ripe-atlas@ripe.net> wrote:
Hello everybody! Currently, I am investigating the possibilities of measurements using RIPE Atlas. Is there information about differences in the measurement results of HW and SW probes? My advisor said that I should rather not use SW probes, but I am not sure what the actual difference is, especially as SW probes often run on better hardware, compared to the HW probes.
Could you point me to some resources on that topic?
Use SW probes. HW probes are: - very limited and approval is prioritized for regions with minimal coverage; Germany is not a region with minimal coverage - shipping can be a mess, I think for a period of time 100% of the probes going to Italy where intercepted in shipping. Perhaps somebody thought the probes would be particularly valuable. - HW can become unreliable, I have spend many hours and bought additional USB sticks following RIPE procedures to keep a probe online, only to see the probe die again after 6 months I'm running SW probes where I can and stopped jumping through hops to keep HW probes online. The HW issues are especially costly to fix for the probe operator when the probes are in hard to reach Pops. Nowadays we should be able to run a (unsupported) Atlas container on 100€-ish Mikrotik Routers. That seems like a much better idea if you are operating the router anyway. Unfortunately the supported SW probes are limited to RHEL and Debian packages. Running a probe in docker or OpenWRT is possible and works fine but is not officially supported. Lukas