[atlas] Easy way to view DNS results?

I see - yeah, I can definitely see the case for not including every bit of
fully parsed data from the response. I would, however, posit that besides
success and RTT, the actual response content itself (especially for simple
A/AAAA records, perhaps not necessarily any query) should be considered
part of the basics, and be at the very least presented in the UI (and as a
wishlist item, aggregated/processed visually, as I believe some other
measurement types are, e.g. in order to more easily spot anomalies).

On a PC it would definitely not be a big deal to use libraries such as that
(and I believe there are also CLI tools) to extract the data, but there are
scenarios where that’s not an option, in my case I’m not often at my own PC
recently so most non-work activities are on a mobile device where that’s
not as easily achieved.

On Tue, Jul 25, 2023 at 10:40 AM Robert Kisteleki <robert at ripe.net> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We're not parsing and inserting all the bits from the raw response into
> the JSON mostly because it would inflate the size of the results
> enormously, while users are generally only interested in specific bits.
>
> The UI gives the basics (success, RTT) to show the big picture but
> exposing all the details would overload the interface, especially on
> mobile.
>
> The "abuf" is always in there, so consumers of the results can parse
> that (as you already know, and as Seth does below). There are abuf
> parsers out there, and if you're using Python then I'd recommend using
> Sagan (https://github.com/RIPE-NCC/ripe-atlas-sagan/)
>
> Cheers,
> Robert
>
>
> On 2023-07-25 07:31, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> > Micha Bailey writes:
> >
> >> Hi, I’m wondering if I’m missing something - I ran a DNS measurement
> with
> >> 110 probes, and the results are in, but the site UI seems to only show
> the
> >> result status and time elapsed until response, but not the results
> >> themselves. Looking at the JSON from the result endpoint I’m seeing
> that it
> >> seems to return the raw binary response - is there a particular reason
> it
> >> can’t be parsed and displayed in a more human-readable format? I know
> there
> >> are libraries and tools that do result parsing, but being on mobile at
> the
> >> moment (and often) means those are somewhat less accessible as far as
> I’m
> >> aware.
> >
> > Hi Micha,
> >
> > Do you mean the way that the JSON contains the "abuf" field with the
> > base64-encoded DNS response?
> >
> > I have actually not worked with these before, but I was able to make some
> > progress in Python as follows (using the python3-dnspython package).
> > You could modify the "to_text()" call to print out some more specific
> > information from the DNS reply of interest to you, or modify the
> enclosing
> > print() to save it elsewhere.
> >
> > I don't know why there isn't a parsed version of the reply included in
> > the JSON, but perhaps the idea is that the literal details are of
> > interest to some researchers.  One example that I happened to notice
> > in trying to answer your question: in parsing a sample DNS measurement
> > this way, I notice the use of DNS case randomization (also called "0x20
> > randomization") in some replies but not in others.  Having the literal
> > DNS query reply could help with analyzing the prevalence of this
> > mechanism, whereas it might be obscured by a parser that was written by
> > someone who believed that DNS replies are not case insensitive (which
> > is true from one point of view, but not from another point of view!).
> >
> >
> > #!/usr/bin/env python3
> >
> > import json
> > import base64
> > from dns import message
> > import sys
> >
> > measurements = json.load(open(sys.argv[1]))
> >
> > for measurement in measurements:
> >      if "resultset" in measurement:
> >          for resultsetitem in measurement["resultset"]:
> >              if "result" in resultsetitem:
> >                  abuf = resultsetitem["result"]["abuf"]
> >                  msg = message.from_wire(base64.b64decode(abuf))
> >                  print(msg.to_text())
> >                  print()
> >
>
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