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HE's portal and direct peering...
pubcrawler
Banned
HE's infamous ASN portal, folks here use it right?
For instance:
http://bgp.he.net/AS24247
Under Peers v4:
http://bgp.he.net/AS24247#_peers
That list of 12 peers, those are directly peered companies. Some just with their own IPs tied into in this instance Internap. Some are the upstream providers to move data.
But, all are truly peered, right? No way to accidentally show up there in any way, right?
Sanity checking something...
Comments
Past using a route server and looking things up (don't even know Internap's) that's the best indicator.
It doesn't upgrade too often, maybe daily - but in terms of traceroute vs. BGP - it's spot on when it comes to the network mixes.
Don't know any other tool that comes close (or tries) with the amount of data.
Say what you want about their bandwidth, but their toolkit / route servers are great tools.
Take the graphs on http://bgp.he.net/ with a grain of salt. They don't actually mean much at all. In theory I could have 100s of peers all with 1mbit connections then one 10GBit HE connection. I could weight all the traffic to the HE connection, but you would never be able to tell that via looking at http://bgp.he.net/
http://www.ris.ripe.net/mt/index.html
http://www.ris.ripe.net/dashboard/AS24247
It will show the peers. Keep in mind, what does this really mean? It does not show any detail about Provider -> Internet. So you could have a provider that has 20 Peers listed on bgp.he.net, you go buy a server from them and you could have 100% of your traffic egress via one carrier.
What this is showing, is what paths you can get to that ASN with. This also is not guaranteed to be in one location. There are several companies that have one ASN in 2, 3, 5, 10 locations. So they may have HE at location 1; Cogent at location 2; Level3 at location 3, and so on, but this list would show HE + Cogent + Level3 as well as some graph, that once again doesn't mean much.
I have seen several instances of where the data shown on bgp.he.net is pointless.
To really understand any major details of a network you need to traceroute in to the network, and out of the network, and still you wouldn't be able to really 100% identify the routing policies in place (other than make guesses).
What it will do is let you see all Prefixes that are advertised under a specific ASN, and it will show you all carriers that advertise those prefixes. It is also possible to have an ASN that shows 1 peer (carrier) that really has 2, 3, 10, etc.
Routing is asymmetric (meaning it doesn't have to take the same path inbound as it does outbound), so it is also quite common for a carrier to advertise out some more expensive peers for the incoming traffic, and never use them for outbound traffic (to make their network look better on bgp.he.net type sites).
These pie chart graphs that it is showing the "blend" is really just showing how their collectors get to you, and really doesn't even do a great job of that.
so, if they have say 50 collectors in the world.. Running traceroutes to the prefixes on that ASN, it is showing the percentage of the carriers it takes for them to get to you.
So you could easily find a provider that advertises their space out several carriers, but only transmits out one inexpensive carrier. (Fools People).
I always say ask for a looking glass to run outbound traceroutes.
@pubcrawler - best way is to telnet to route-views.routeviews.org and look at the table for a specific prefix to get an idea of the inbound path.
As @Ionity mentions this could have little, if anything to do with how traffic gets back to you. It's not uncommon for providers to announce via pnap and push all traffic out cogent.
the bgp.he.net is a nice visual tool for quickly getting an idea about an ASN. Some basic principles do apply - a host with a single upstream and a /24 likely isn't scaling the same as one with tens of thousands of ips and many more peers.
As @Spirit pointed out RIS is another great tool, although often slow/buggy/has downtime and is generally annoying as most ripe services.
Oh, on the topic of great tools - http://bgplay.routeviews.org/ which while clunky, can give you an accurate representation of what's happening with a prefix over a period of time (based on routeview data)
Just, freaking goldmine of responses. The network heavyweights are on here tonight.
Thanks @Spirit @Ionity and @unused!
I'm on the right track. Trying to pin down an ASN that is direct peered with a colo facility. Even though in theory such shouldn't be going on. Long story. Involves a question I asked in another thread tonight
I see the peering, and traceroutes confirm the ASN as a direct peer is hanging out in the others datacenter. I recognize the route like I do the morning sun.
You can also check sites such as:
http://bgpupdates.potaroo.net/cgi-bin/generate_as_log?as=24247
This shows a log of changes relating to 24247
As well as:
http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS24247&view=2.0