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.
None of the 6 hosts that PingER monitors in Japan went down for an extended period of time 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 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 |
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.
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:
Conclusion It is not the site RIKEN that has gone bad, rather it is some of the routes
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.shtm|http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/03/japan-quake.shtml]
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.