[dns-wg] More anchors involved in DNSMON measurements

On 2014.07.15. 10:12, Peter Koch wrote:
> Hi Robert,
> 
>> Due to the growth of numbers in active RIPE Atlas anchors, we started
>> involving more anchors from outside our service region in DNSMON
>> measurements. This has a natural effect on the visualisations: the newly
>> involved anchors don't have a measurement history yet, so they show up as
>> "no data" before the addition.
> 
> thanks for the heads up and good to see the measurement network is growing!
> Could you please elaborate a bit on how you select the anchors per TLD/domain
> monitored and what your thoughts re stability (of the anchor set over time)
> and comparability (of the sets used for one domain vs another) are?
> I wonder whether it would scale to run all measurements from all the
> anchors and then only "customize" the covering set for the display.
> 
> -Peter

Hi Peter, all,

For consistency reasons we're trying to involve the same set of anchors for
monitoring each zone. This will probably not scale forever, but we'll try to
do this as long as we can.

Earlier we've heard from operators that they'd appreciate if we used a wider
set of anchors, eg. add more from outside the EU. So this time we added the
following:
1) us-sea-as2914, Seattle, ID 6065
2) us-dal-as7366, Dallas, ID 6067
3) us-atl-as2914, Atlanta, ID 6066
4) us-mia-as2914, Miami, ID 6062
5) uy-mvd-as28000, Montevideo, ID 6054
6) za-jnb-as10474, Johannesburg, ID 6053
7) tn-tun-as5438, Tunis, ID 6051
8) au-mel-as38796, Melbourne, ID 6044
9) au-bne-as4608, Brisbane, ID 6055
10) ru-mow-as47764, Moscow, ID 6046

The number of anchors is expected to grow to an unknown (but hopefully high)
number, meaning there has to be a cutoff at some reasonable point.

Indeed some anchors are more stable than others. That's not a new
phenomenon, I believe it happened to TTM boxes as well. As for what to do
with anchors that consistently fail or are down for along time: we don't
have a policy defined yet. I'd expect that if a particular anchor proves to
be useless for this purpose, then we'll remove it from the pool. (But, after
how long? 3-6-12 months, 1 year? We're happy to receive advice from the
community about this.)

Hope this helps,
Robert