Traceroute: why does "edst" ping.ripe.net show up?

RIPE Atlas
1

Hi,

I’ve ran a few traceroutes on RIPE Atlas and for a few of them I get

"edst": "193.0.0.4"

in some result hop.

It’s always that IP address which seems to be ping.ripe.net. I’ve never traceroute’d towards ping.ripe.net which is why I’m a bit confused to why this shows up.

An example is this traceroute.

My best guess would be that the traceroute interferes with some other measurement on the same probe that goes towards ping.ripe.net. For example, with one of the basic connectivity checks (see docs).

But I’m not sure. I’d appreciate if anybody has an idea.

Best,

J.

2

I looked a bit more into it and found that there are also other "edst” IP addresses, namely 193.0.14.129 which is k.root-servers.net and 192.5.5.241 which is f.root-servers.net.

This would match my guess that these might be results from other measurements that each RIPE Atlas probe runs periodically (at least k.root-servers.net is listed in the “Basic connectivity” section of the docs).

Still not sure though.