Thursday, February 3, 2011

Egypt Internet Back Online

"“All major Egyptian ISPs appear to have readvertised routes to their domestic customer networks in the global routing table…The rebooted Egyptian table is smaller than it was a week ago, but that’s mostly because of a normal process called “reaggregation” (the deletion of very small, specific customer routes that are partially or totally redundant with existing announcements, generally for purposes of traffic engineering). That’s to be expected: the Egyptian table had gotten pretty dense with redundancy in the week leading up to the takedown, and it’s been cleaned up in the process of being brought back.

“It wasn’t totally smooth; a few larger network blocks belonging to the Egyptian Universities Network (AS2561) were still missing. Unfortunately, these included the address space that hosts the .eg top level domain servers. The routes have since recovered.”"


Egypt Internet Restored; Cairo Protests Turn Violent

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"To restore the country's connections, Egyptian Internet service providers (ISPs) re-configured their core routers so that they once again announced their presence, letting upstream providers and other networks reestablish data pathways.

"It was pretty much similar, except reversed, to what happened last week," said Andree Toonk, the founder and lead developer of BGPmon, an open-source tool for monitoring BGP, or "border gateway protocol."

BGP is the protocol at the heart of the Internet's routing mechanism, and is used by routers to share information about the paths data traffic uses to "hop" from one network to another as it moves from a source to its destination.

The speed with which the networks reconnected was evidence that rather than physically plugging in cables, Egypt's ISPs simply began advertising their availability to other networks' routers using BGP, said Toonk.

"That, and the fact that it all happened at the same time shows the disconnect was probably not physical," said Toonk. Nor was the restoration today. "Everything was restored in about half an hour," he said.

According to Toonk's monitoring, the first BGP announcements for Egypt began at 9:30 a.m. UTC, or 11:30 a.m. local time. The start time Toonk cited was 4:30 a.m. ET and 1:30 a.m. PT in the U.S.

Internet monitoring company Renesys also pegged the reconnect time for the bulk of Egypt's networks at around 30 minutes."


ComputerWorld - Egypt reverses 'kill switch' to restore Internet access

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A good rundown with links to a number of stories around the internet restoration:

ComputerWorld - Egypt Internet returns; violent protests continue

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"It appears Internet service is making a comeback in the embattled nation of Egypt, according to posts which lit up social networks such as Twitter today.

Early this morning, Google tweeted, "Good news: Internet access being restored in Egypt." The search giant also linked to its Transparency Report, a web tool which allows anyone to view Google's traffic on platforms such as Google Search, Blogger, and YouTube.

Egypt Google traffic has risen dramatically today, after days of little Egyptian web activity registering on Google platforms.

Top and rising search terms in Egypt during the past 7 days - including days the Internet was blocked and today, when Internet access was re-established - include "demonstrations", "constitution", "Al Jazeera", "news", "photos", and "Facebook"."


New York Times - Egypt Internet back; info-hungry Egyptians Google Al Jazeera and Facebook, report chaos on Twitter

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"...today, the Internet crackled to life in Egypt for the first time in more than four days. "No traffic blocks are in place, DNS answers are clean, IP addresses match, no funny business," reported Renesys, the Internet tracking firm that had first reported last week that Egypt had largely been disconnected from the Internet.

What gives? That concurrent tightening of the political scene and rediscovered Internet openness in Egypt is indeed a little puzzling. Does the Mubarak regime have some sort of savvy master plan to harness the Internet to their benefit, giving them a way to sell their version of events to the world? Or perhaps use it to track protesters? Or is the Mubarak administration that might be in its last throes just flailing about wildly here? What's going on here?"

techPresident - Why'd a Battle-Ready Mubarak Turn Egypt's Internet Back On?

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