Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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Routing Information Service
Concepts & Internals
  • Matthew Williams
  • http://www.ripe.net/ris/


  • Techy Talk, 20th of Dec. 2001
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Who are the RIS Crew?
  • Arife Coltekin,
  • Network Engineer
  • Daniel Karrenberg, Chief Scientist
  • Henk Uijterwaal,
  • N.P. Project Manager
  • Luigi Corsello,
  • Jr. Network Engineer
  • Matthew Williams,
  • Cust. Liaison Engineer
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Overview
  • Background & Introduction
  • RIS Data Flow & Internals
  • Current Services
  • The RISreport
  • Future Plans
  • Short Summary
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Routing Information Service
  • Background
  • &
  • Introduction
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Why the RIS?
  • Many tools that debug Internet connectivity, e.g. Ping, TraceRoute, Protocol Analyzers, Router debug commands e.t.c.
  • Major drawback – No ‘history’. Only works with the current status and configuration
  • Another drawback – No perspective ‘mobility’ (exception: Looking Glasses, however, not all are available to the public and they only provide information about the AS where it’s installed)
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So what is it then…
  • From RIPE-200:
  • Collects default-free BGP routing information between AS’s (EBGP) from several locations and stores it as a function of time at RIPE NCC
  • Allows service’s users to see all routes anywhere on the Internet and their development over time
  • Think of the RIS as a giant, integrated Looking Glass with historical information about the Internet’s logical structure.





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Simple Graphical Overview
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RIS Evolution
  • Project started officially in July 1999 (A. Antony)
  • RIS Design Note (Ripe-200), October 1999
  • First RIS Prototype, RRC00 - RIPE NCC, presented at RIPE-35, February 2000
  • Collected data stored in MySQL dBase by May 2000


  • Second Route Collector (RRC01) at LINX, July 2000
  • RISreport demonstrated to the RIPE community at RIPE-39, May 2001
  • Today 7 active RRC’s with a total of 171 BGP sessions
  • Investigating how additional RRC’s will add to data validity
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Routing Information Service
  • Data Flow
  • &
  • Internals
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What is a RRC box?
  • Software router using Zebra’s BGP daemon
  • No BGP announcements from RRC (‘quiet’)
  • Peering configured on between RRC and peers at IXP
  • BGP update dumps every 15 min
  • RIB snapshots, i.e. BGP table, every 8 hours
  • Dumps in MRT binary format stored locally on RRC’s HDD
  • NTP synchronization & UTC Time-stamps
  • Collect script on Abcoude pulls binary files, the ‘Raw Data’, to central storage at RIPE NCC using RSYNC via SSH tunnel
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Data Collection Points
  • RRC00 - RIPE NCC (Singel)
  • RRC01 - London (LINX)
  • RRC02 - Paris (SFINX)
  • RRC03 - Amsterdam (AMS-IX)
  • RRC04 - Geneva (CIXP)
  • RRC05 - Vienna (VIX)
  • RRC06 - Otemachi (NSPIXP2)
  • [RRC07 – Stockholm (Netnod-IX)]
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Abcoude – Heart of the RIS
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DBinsert into Database
  • DBinsert process uses ‘Route_Btoa’ tool from the Multi-Threaded Routing Toolkit (www.mrtd.net)
  • Route_Btoa converts binary MRT format to ASCii
  • DBinsert then inserts ASCii data into MySQL dBase
  • DBinsert constantly polls for raw data files
  • Special table (‘updtlist’) in dBase, used by DBinsert for logging all insertion processes of raw files


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Overview of RIS dBase structure
  • Each RRC has its own dBase
  • Tables for BGP updates: ‘ryyyymmdd’
  • Tables  for RIB dumps: ‘lribyyyymmdd’
  • These have foreign keys pointing to ‘Prefix’, ‘Aspath’ & ‘Peer’ tables
  • ‘Prefix’ stores all prefixes seen by the RIS
  • ‘Aspath’ stores all aspaths seen by the RIS
  • ‘Peer’ keeps all information about BGP peers
  • ‘Updtlist’ is stand-alone and, as mentioned, logs all insertion processes
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RIS Services
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Current Services
  • ASInuse
  • Search RIS dBase by AS
  • Search RIS dBase by Prefix
      • Collected data in dBase for 3 months
  • Looking Glass
    • show IP BGP, show IP BGP summary, show version, ping, trace
  • Raw Data
  • Later section… RISreport
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ASInuse
  • ASInuse will query the RIS dBase when a given AS Number was last seen and retrieve all AS Paths that contain the ASN.
  • Used by Registration Services to see if allocated ASN is announced on the Internet
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AS Query
  • Lists all prefixes that originate from specified AS and paths back to it from RRC’s perspective (‘view’)


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Prefix Query
  • Lists AS from which prefix originates and path to it from RRC (same concept: ‘view’)
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Looking Glass (beta)
  • How network is seen from specific location where the looking glass in located
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Logical View of Example
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Raw Data
  • Mainly used for research
  • Binary MRT format
  • Route_Btoa tool from the Multi-Threaded Routing Toolkit converts the data to ASCii


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Research based on RIS Raw Data
  • By analyzing our data, they concluded that there’s a strong correlation between BGP message storms and worm propagation periods.
  • Especially interesting since the time period of research spans the Twin Towers attack in NYC
  • There’s a link from our WWW pages
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Querying the RIS dBase
  • ASinuse
  • AS Query
  • Prefix Query
  • Looking Glass
  • And the…
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The RISreport
  • Creating graphical representations of RIS data using RRD tool


  • T. Franchetti’s  Master’s Thesis
  • “Internet Routing Analysis Provided by the RISreport”
  • (May 2001)


  • http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/np/analysis.html
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What is RRD?
  • RRD – Round Robin Database
  • Developed by Tobi Oetiker
  • Tracks variable over time (min, max, avg, last)
  • Fixed dBase size after creation because data ‘drops’ out of dBase (‘circle analogy’)
  • Database definitions cannot be changed later and one cannot go back in time if data is missing
  • Round Robin Archives also defined in the dBase relate to different time periods, e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, yearly
  • Longer time periods will naturally have lesser resolution
  • RRDTool is used to insert data into RRD and plot graphs
  • http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/index.html


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Two Branches of the RISreport
  • BGP Count (RRDTool and Perl Scripts)
    • BGP Count
    • BGP Count Normalized
    • Unique Announcements
  • Prefix /N (MySQL and GNUplot)
    • Prefix Distribution (Histogram)
  • Graphs generated once per day
  • Only RRC00 (Ripe NCC) and RRC01 (LINX)
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Implementation of BGP Count
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BGP Count
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Implementation of Prefix /N
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Prefix Distribution
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The Future is Bright…
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Future Plans
  • Internet Routing Table ‘State Report’
    • Similar to P. Smith’s weekly report but on a daily basis
  • Top Ten Lists
    • Announcements
    • Withdrawals
    • Route Flaps (AAdup, WAdup)
  • Extending the RISreport
    • Include more Route Collectors
    • Number of leaf, transit or all AS’s seen by the RIS
    • Ratios of announced / allocated ASN’s or IP address space
    • AS Path Length averages, variances and standard deviations
    • RRD allows for practically any variable to be plotted over time




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Summary
  • RIS - Giant Looking Glass with history information about Internet’s logical structure
  • Principals for collection of BGP routing information
  • Current Services – Interpretation of query results
  • RISreport - Plotting RIS data


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Questions, Discussion