BGP.Tools: Browse the Internet Ecosystem | Hacker News Reader

BGP.Tools: Browse the Internet Ecosystem

bgp.tools

253 pointsluu17 comments

Credit to Ben who built this, it's really nice.

If you're a network engineer and aren't yet using this... What are you doing?

Also check out the Prometheus metrics available as a feed format you can scrape (paying customers).

Ben's great and this area is not one that sees much innovation, this is all round a far better bgp.he.net and indispensable for network teams.

The changelog is always impressive.

Quoting for endorsement.

Ben, of https://blog.benjojo.co.uk [1] and https://age-encryption.org/design fame, built something genuinely useful out of sheer technical depth, use case understanding, and experience.

I don't really work with networks but the changelog is indeed a great read because 1) I learn stuff, and 2) it's great to see a useful focused product just get better.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=benjojo.co.uk

For serious stuff you have services like ThousandEyes ( disclaimer: No affiliation of any kind with the company ).

Ben is an amazing guy - some really cool sw/hw reverse engineering / POCs on his personal blog.

You can also `ssh lg@bgp.tools` for terminal-based “Looking Glass” queries (which is how such an interface is referred to, as they provide a view into internet routing from each provider. https://www.bgplookingglass.com/)

In a similar vein, there’s also https://bgp.he.net.

The real OG.

For network debugging participating in the NLNOG ring is a must:

https://ring.nlnog.net/

ssh access to VMs hosted just about everwhere with lots of tools.

https://ring.nlnog.net/toolbox/

https://ring.nlnog.net/toolbox/looking-glass/

Anonymous pubic SSH for access to the tools is really a nice option...

Pubic SSH? :-D

Wow! Lots of information in a snappy interface.

It even picks up what my DNS server is. Neat!

That's surprising to me. Any idea how it does it?

Pretty easy. The website will request a specific DNS domain via XHR, something like: 49uz89psdfu89.dns.bgp.tools and will record the address that contacts the DNS server.

A follow up request to the backend fills in the response.

Interesting, I guess that should have been obvious. I was going to suggest that it wouldn't detect cached lookups, but of course that's the point of the random subdomain. Still, there must be some topologies where this is not a reliable method of getting anything but the resolver closest to the nameserver. For example, if I have a recursive resolver running on my home network, and it resolves via 8.8.8.8, then this site will see 8.8.8.8 and not my home IP. (The same would be true even if my "internal" resolver were running on a public endpoint.)

I assume this is a common fingerprinting technique. In theory, a privacy preserving DNS service could route its outbound requests through random IP addresses that do not correlate to the DNS server. Although I'm not sure how useful that would be since an adversary could enumerate all the associated addresses of a resolver by repeatedly looking up random domains and noting the external IP.