Please excuse me in advance if this isn’t the appropriate category for this question. I have been using RIPE Atlas lately and was running some measurements and visualizing traceroute paths in Khipu towards some anchors. I noticed that for one measurement toward a specific anchor that Khipu was flagging it as using an anycast service which I found interesting.
First, how does Khipu/RIPE Atlas detect if a target IP is using anycast? Second, is anycast possible for anchors?
Thanks for the question. Normally no anchor is supported to be running in multiple places using the same IP, so it would seem that this is either a Khipu or IPmap (the source of anycast info for Khipu) error. Would you mind providing the measurement in question so that we can investigate?
Thanks for that, I have some answers. No anchor should ever be labeled anycast except by mistake. This one was labeled as such because of a weak signal in IPmap anyway (which is why it was marked “possible”). So I will be removing this from Khipu for clarity. Only non-anchor targets will get anycast lookups. This should be in production in the next week or so. Thanks again for reporting this.
On a not unrelated note: We will be spending some time over the coming months improving IPmap for better, more accurate results. Stay tuned.
Thanks once again for the detailed feedback and prompt action, this completely answers my question. I will be also checking out IPmap, it seems to have very interesting functionalities.