Dear Roman, We are in fact working on something very much like what you suggested: one-off "fast track" measurements, which will run only once, immediately, and have a very quick response time (order of 10-15 seconds is expected). The feature will support ping, traceroute and DNS queries for a start. Based on this feature we plan to provide "quick look" services to our community; a simple enough interface that will also present the results immediately in some intuitive form and appropriate summary, in addition to the raw results. Unfortunately we will not be able to provide this to the general public, at least not at first, because we do not have unlimited capacity and we have to serve the RIPE NCC membership first. But starting from here we can evaluate if and how we can provide the service to a wider community. Regards, Robert Kisteleki RIPE NCC R&D On 2013.03.16. 21:40, Roman Mamedov wrote:
Hello,
I would like to suggest for RIPE to implement a simple "Looking Glass" style interface to run one-time measurements (ping and traceroute) on probes.
If anyone doesn't know what Looking Glass is, some examples are http://lg.he.net/ , http://www.oneasiahost.com/lg/ , http://cl.edis.at/ etc.
Key features of such Atlas interface would be:
- Interface similar to generic "Looking Glasses" as those mentioned above;
- Allow access to general public, not requiring registration or login (maybe with some rate-limiting on requests);
- Allow running ping and traceroute from any probe (or maybe only from a subset, hosts of which express a desire to participate in this public LG subproject), to any arbitrary IPv4/v6/hostname destination;
- One-shot execution only (not scheduled checking over time, like the current measurements);
- Real-time returning of the results(!); this might be tricky, it means a RIPE server will need to have means to instantly connect to the selected probe, ask it to perform a measurement and then retrieve results, all in "online" real-time mode. This might exclude probes which are behind a NAT and without IPv6 or with strict firewalling.