Background
A long time ago, I got a RIPE Atlas probe from a friend of mine — who does not know Stéphane Bortzmeyer?. For those who don’t know, these probes creates a big friendly botnet that enables all users — including you, whether you have one or not — to create “measurements” on the global Internet.
Measurements are used today to (guess what) measure things like DNS queries, network latencies and more. Having a probe enables you to participate by submitting your own network data. The more probes there are, the better. It has been frequently used on the past to find out about DNS censorship like here, here or here.
How does it work? The probes have a set of builtin measurements that get sent regularely to the RIPE servers and there is an API available to make queries out of these probes. There is of course an official tool available but it is in Python. While I could just use it, I do not like Python.
Various tools are available in different languages as well here.
As a Golang fan, I’ve tried to use these and was never satisfied. Either the CLI sucks or the tool had too many dependencies or something else. So you can guess, I had to write one myself. That was also an excuse to play a bit more with Go as a language :)
And today, I released version 0.21 of my so called ripe-atlas tool. After (way too many) commits, changes and test-by-errors, it is now usable.
Read on →