There are some interesting results from the Japanese earthquake of March 11th 2011. According to http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0001xgp.phpl the big (8.9) one was Friday, March 11, 2011 at 05:46:23 UTC.
Overview:
Internet connectivity to the hosts PingER monitors in Japan was maintained. Round Trip Times (RTT) to some hosts increased significantly as seen from SLAC. However as seen from RIKEN in Japan they did not increase. It appears the increase in RTT depends on the route from the monitoring host to Japan. This suggests a possible cable disruption.
While the Internet appears to have kept running remarkably well (though some end hosts were not reachable a day later), the phone network did not fare so well.
PingER results
All of the 6 hosts that PingER monitors in Japan stayed up at the time of the earthquake. The hosts monitored are seen in the table below.
IP name |
Alias |
City |
Institution |
|
---|---|---|---|---|
glbb.jp |
JP.GLBB |
Okinawa |
Speedtest |
|
www.kek.jp |
JP.KEK |
Tsukuba |
KEK |
|
ns.osaka-u.ac.jp |
JP.U-OSAKA |
Osaka |
Osaka University |
|
ping.riken.jp |
JP.RIKEN |
Wako-Shi |
RIKEN |
|
www.u-tokyo.ac.jp |
JP.U-Tokyo |
Tokyo |
Tokyo University |
|
ns.jp.apan.net |
NET.APAN |
Tokyo |
APAN |
|
However as can be seen from the map below, we were not monitoring a Japanese host near the epicenter.
Tohoku University (www.tohoku.ac.jp), which we were not monitoring previously, on the outskirts of Sendai and close to the earthquake was not responding on 3/12/2011 12:46pm PST.
53cottrell@pinger:~>ping www.tohoku.ac.jp ping: unknown host www.tohoku.ac.jpExit 2
Also www.jp.kek although responding on 3/10/2011 it was no longer responding at noon 3/11/2011.
60cottrell@pinger:~>ping www.jp.kek ping: unknown host www.jp.kek Exit 2 64cottrell@pinger:~>ping 130.87.104.107 PING 130.87.104.107 (130.87.104.107) 56(84) bytes of data. From 134.79.252.133 icmp_seq=31 Destination Host Unreachable From 134.79.252.133 icmp_seq=58 Destination Host Unreachable
Japanese hosts seen From SLAC
Looking from SLAC there are big increases in the average RTTs and minimum RTTs for some Japanese sites (but not all). The spreadsheet gives more details.
RIKEN seen from the world
Looking at RIKEN (a monitoring mode and so easy to select on and also one of the most affected as seen from SLAC) seen from the world looking at avg RTT and min RTT we see:
- No effect seen from Africa, E. Asia, Europe, L. America, M. East
- Big effect from N. America (Canada 163ms=>264ms, US 120ms=>280ms)
- India CDAC Mumbia no effect, Pune 380ms=> 460ms, VSNL Mumbia 360ms=>400ms
- Sri Lanka no effect
- Pakistan (we have lots of monitors so should be interesting).
- NIIT sees no effect (nb not on PERN)
- The PERN (Pakistan Education and Research Network) nodes starting with 111. (apart from UAAR see later, this needs more investigation) see 420ms=>500ms
- The PERN nodes starting with 121. See no effect
Conclusion It is not the site RIKEN that has gone bad, rather it is some of the routes
RIKEN Looking at Japan
Japanese hosts seen from JP.RIKEN.N3 (RIKEN) see no impact on RTT
It looks the problem is in the route to Japan not within Japan itself. I wonder if the undersea earthquake has disrupted some cables? This appears to be in line with the information from http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/03/japan-quake.shtml.
Routes
Comparing the routes from SLAC to RIKEN (ping.riken.jp) and from SLAC to NET.APAN.N2 (ns.jp.apan.net) we see RIKEN has more hops and goes Eastwards via the Avenue of the Americas in NY, while APAN goes directly via Sunnyvale near SLAC and then via Pacific Wave directly to Japan. The traceroutes from SLAC to the University of OSAKA and the University of TOKYO are similar to traceroute from SLAC to RIKEN.