Internet Black Holes

An anonymous reader writes "Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur. Hubble has operated continuously since September 17, 2007. During that time, it identified 881,090 black holes and reachability problems. In the most recent quarter-hourly round, completed at 04:40 PDT, 04/09/2008, Hubble issued 46,846 traceroutes to 1,815 prefixes it identified as likely to be experiencing problems (of 78,772 total prefixes monitored by the system). Of these, it found 195 prefixes to be unreachable from all its vantage points and 139 to be reachable from some vantage points and not others." No relationship to that other Hubble which also tries to find black holes ;)

Comments

More info ...

[xmas2003]

Here's the full academic paper on Hubble - this work is out of my alma-mater, the University of Washington - go Huskies!

Wikipedia has more info on Black Holes in Networking ... and for grins, here is a Green Hole ;-)

Re:Does it matter?

[Riachu_11]

ErrorZilla mods the firefox error page to give options for the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, and Coral Cache.

Re:Does it matter?

[arth1]

I thought a "black hole" was when the hosts were there, and you can send packets to them, but there's no packets coming back. Just like you can send mass and light into a black hole, but you won't get a reply.
In the case of Internet black holes, it's usually due to bad routing or misconfigured firewalls (which, IMNSHO, is most of them, and it will continue to be so as long as companies hire on ability to do, and not actually understanding what you do).

Re:Map?

[NibbleAbit]

I thought it represented server density (Closely relate to population and wealth density?)