Saturday, May 06, 2006
Pings from a Plane
[Spent most of yesterday in bed—when I wasn't in bed, I did some surfing and came across this link worthy of being mentioned, but didn't have the energy. Good thing, since I can use it for today when I, thinking I was feeling better, did stuff I probably shouldn't have and paid for it later on. Oi. —Editor]
I just saw my plane cross the mid-Atlantic, not by looking out the window, but by watching routing updates cascade across the Internet. I'm writing from a Lufthansa jet right now, travelling from Munich to Boston. This plane offers the (relatively) new Connexion by Boeing wifi + satellite Internet service. It's seriously cool stuff—high latency, but absolutely functional. I've been aware of it for a while since the Boeing folks did a NANOG presentation about it last year. But this is the first time I've been able to use it.
Via jwz, Tracking Plane Flight on Internet
Now that's just darned neat. I know that Dan the Network engineer is playing around with BGP (setting up a dedicated BGP server to handle the full BGP routing table instead of trying to shoehorn the full BGP routing table into our routers) and I think it would be neat to see an Internet visualization via BGP routing (which is more a policy based routing protocol through autonomous systems than a technical based routing protocol like OSPF).