Looking Glass (Internet)

Looking Glass (Engl. Mirrors ) is a software to provide information about transmission routes -tool in the Internet to obtain.

Routing information is transmitted on the Internet using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing protocol . With this routing protocol, the Internet is divided into so-called autonomous systems (AS) and instead of exchanging information about each individual computer on the Internet, only information about these autonomous systems is transmitted.

Looking Glass usually consists of a collection of scripts (e.g. Perl scripts) that run on a computer with a web frontend , via which commands (e.g. ping , traceroute , BGP commands, etc.) with the corresponding Parameters can be sent to the router on the Internet.

The results are then also displayed by the web front end and are used, for example, to troubleshoot routing problems.

Web links

• NCC RIPE Looking Glass - web-based interface for executing BGP commands on a BGP router from various backbone providers
• MRLG - Multi-router Looking Glass for PHP
• BGP IPv4 / IPv6 Looking Glass Servers (www.bgp4.as) - Worldwide list of Looking Glass Servers