Chasing Anycast IP Addresses
One of my readers sent me this question:
My job required me to determine if one IP address is unicast or anycast. Is it possible to get this information from the bgp dump?
TL&DR: Not with anything close to 100% reliability. An academic research paper (HT: Andrea di Donato) documents a false-positive rate of around 10%.
If you’re not familiar with IP anycast: it’s a brilliant idea of advertising the same prefix from multiple independent locations, or the same IP address from multiple servers. Works like a charm for UDP (that’s how all root DNS servers are built) and supposedly pretty well across distant-enough locations for TCP (with a long list of caveats when used within a data center).


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