
The man who can see the Internet - ghosh
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/06/the-man-who-can-see-the-internet/
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jsmthrowaway
It's articles like this that remind me the tools I take for granted like BGP,
traceroute, and viewing the structure of the Internet at a fundamental level,
are a complete mystery to most people outside the industry. Yet everyone
depends on the end product every day.

Little bit humbling.

~~~
doorhammer
Seconded.

It's also humbling to think how such common tools can be used in a new way to
get novel and useful insight into global politics by a relatively small group
of people.

It reminds me how I'm constantly underestimating how powerful a lever for the
mind computers can be.

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hackmiester
My workplace does run BGP but we don't have the whole table. Is there anywhere
I can see something like that "BGP ticker" ? Is that channel on a publicly-
available IRC network?

~~~
adamt
There are various BGP looking glass servers that can enable you to see the
output of various things like this.

Better still is some of the 'bgplay' tools that are out there. For example,
RIPE hosts one here:

[https://stat.ripe.net/widget/bgplay](https://stat.ripe.net/widget/bgplay)

This gives a nice graphical diagram of the way BGP routes have changed over
the past few days to a server of your choice.

If you stick in an Internet address that has changed paths recently (e.g.
131.111.150.25 would currently be such an example), you'll then see how the
BGP paths have changed, and what ASNs the traffic has travelled through. Very
useful for debugging potential network problems.

