Oregon Routeviews now has a looking glass

Are you using the RouteViews collectors as remote looking glasses? If so, we are now making your life easier. https://lg.routeviews.org/ now provides you with a well-known web front end to all the RouteViews collectors. No need to log in to the individual collectors using telnet any more.

The looking glass provides you with the most common BGP commands and you can select any of the RouteViews collectors. You can view routing tables, BGP summaries, and specific prefix paths directly from each collector, making it easier to analyze routing behavior across different parts of the global Internet.

Why a web front end?

Why are we doing this? Many RouteViews users love the CLI, but over the years, more and more users are frowning at telnet for the lack of encryption and the general perception is that telnet is a legacy protocol with security issues. The looking glass is our first step towards removing the direct telnet access to all collectors.

A front end for users to access our collectors also gives us the ability to control the load on the collectors better – for the purpose of securing stability and consistency of the total platform. With the looking glass, we have introduced a bit of rate limiting. So there is a risk that you will encounter a “Sorry the collector is busy right now.” But fret not, it will most likely just be for a few seconds, so just take a sip of coffee and try again if it happens. We believe this to be a better experience than the occasionally laggy keys when the collector is busy.

How to use the RouteViews Looking Glass:

For example, we want to see who are the peers on the collector in Serbia:

1. In the drop down list “Node” select “route-views.soxrs”
2. Select BGP
3. In the additional Parameter field type in “summary”
4. Select IPv4 or IPv6 and hit the Submit button

Which results in:>

And if you want to see the prefixes we learn from Cloudflare, the regexp option will show you:

Which results in: Note that the illustration is a sample of the much longer output

Conclusion

We are excited to launch this well-known tool. We hope the users of the RouteViews system will appreciate this new service and use it well. We have undoubtedly forgotten to implement your favorite CLI command, so please try it out and give us feedback on what is missing, any bugs or weird behaviours that you may see.