The Opte Project
from the same



Who
This project was started by Barrett Lyon as a response to a conversation with his colleagues. "Over a lunch we were discussing William Cheswick and Hal Burch's Internet Mapping Project. I was not very impressed with the results of their project, they produce beautiful maps but they don't seem to be very useful nor do they release their code freely. Their mapping also takes nearly six months to generate a single map. My comment was that, "I can write a program that can map the entire net in a single day." The comment was met with some hostility. Thus, this project was born."

What
The goal of this project is to use a single computer and single Internet connection to map the location of every single class C network on the Internet. It is obvious that the Internet is not routed as a bunch of class-c networks, but it is easy to see that by treating the Internet IP space as a bunch of class C networks, it will be possible to make a detailed map of the entire Internet. The global Internet address space currently offers 32 bits worth of unique host addresses, or a theoretical maximum of 2^32=4,294,967,296 hosts. In reality, the address space has been allocated in fairly large contiguous blocks, which renders strictly optimal utilization difficult. The smallest block that is logically routed via BGP or allocated by ARIN is a class C network (CIDR /24.)

Map colors break down as follows:

posted by awiggins | 11:15 AM