Hurricane Electric Finds a Way Through the Looking Glass

Fremont, California February 25, 2002 - Hurricane Electric, a leading Technical Service Provider, has created a network engineer's Wonderland through their Looking Glass, a program designed to allow the Internet community to see routing paths from inside Hurricane Electric's network via a web interface.

Designed mostly for the technically savvy, the Looking Glass, http://lg.he.net, enables users to ping or trace, tools to test network connectivity, from any or all core routers in Hurricane Electric's network. The program also allows users to peek at Hurricane Electric's entire BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) tables showing paths to other company's network or Autonomous Systems. It also allows users to run a BGP summary, which shows statistics on all neighboring routers and peering sessions.

Hurricane Electric's Looking Glass is one of the only such technologies to support both IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and mulitcast query (ping or trace) types. Hurricane Electric offers a free tunnel broker, http://tunnelbroker.net, to the public to increase the use and progression of IPv6, a 128-bit addressing system which, experts say, will eventually replace the current 32-bit addressing system, IPv4.

The Looking Glass was developed to allow any Network Operator, downstream customer, or simply a curious person to check on the status of the network or routes, paths taken from a source to a destination, at any given time through an IP address query.

This gives an advantage to customers that would like to see how their packets are traversing the Internet and how long it takes for a packet to arrive at it's destination. A customer can also check on the status of the network before calling into the Hurricane Electric 24/7 Network Operations Center (NOC) to see if there is a problem with a line outside of the network.

Developed upon the Yet Another Looking Glass (YALG) open source software, http://www.sofaraway.org/projects/yalg/, the Looking Glass also supports multiple vendors' hardware and can send a query to multiple routers at the same time.

Currently, the Looking Glass is able to run through 6 routers in the core of Hurricane Electric's network at the following locations: Fremont, CA; New York, NY (NYIIX); San Jose, CA (MAEWest); Palo Alto, CA (PAIX); Chicago, IL (AADS); and Vienna, VA (MAEEast).

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