This is the RIPE Atlas software probe packaged as a Docker image.

• 1 CPU core (of course)
• 20MiB memory
• 100MiB HDD
• A Linux installation with Docker installed
• Internet access

The following prebuilt tags are available at Docker Hub. The latest tag supports multi-arch, and should be used by default.

• latest: For all supported devices listed below (multi-arch)
• latest-arm64: For arm64 (aarch64) devices
• latest-armv7l: For armv7l (armhf) devices
• latest-i386: For i386 devices
• latest-amd64: For amd64 devices

First we start the container:

docker run --detach --restart=always \
	--log-driver json-file --log-opt max-size=10m \
	--cpus=1 --memory=64m --memory-reservation=64m \
	--cap-drop=ALL --cap-add=CHOWN --cap-add=SETUID --cap-add=SETGID --cap-add=DAC_OVERRIDE --cap-add=NET_RAW \
	-v /var/atlas-probe/etc:/var/atlas-probe/etc \
	-v /var/atlas-probe/status:/var/atlas-probe/status \
	-e RXTXRPT=yes \
	--name ripe-atlas --hostname "$(hostname --fqdn)" \
	jamesits/ripe-atlas:latest

An example docker-compose.yaml is provided.

git clone https://github.com/Jamesits/docker-ripe-atlas.git
cd docker-ripe-atlas
docker-compose pull
docker-compose up -d

Fetch the generated public key:

cat /var/atlas-probe/etc/probe_key.pub

Register the probe with your public key. After the registration being manually processed, you'll see your new probe in your account.

If you don't want to use the prebuilt image hosted on the Docker Hub, you can build your own image.

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build -t ripe-atlas .

Note that building this container image requires BuildKit.

Docker 27.0.1 enabled IPv6 (incl. ip6tables and NATv6) by default.

If you are on older versions: Docker does not enable IPv6 by default. If you want IPv6 support, some level of setup and a basic understanding of IPv6 is required. Swarm mode & some Kubernetes implementation supports IPv6 too with extra configuration.

If you happened to have a block of static IPv6 addresses routed to your host, you can directly assign one of the addresses to the container. Edit /etc/docker/daemon.json and add native IPv6 address blocks, then restart the Docker daemon. An example:

{
  "ipv6": true,
  "fixed-cidr-v6": "2001:db8:a1a3::/48"
}

Notes:

• These config work on Docker for Linux only
• If daemon.json exists, merge the config lines instead of directly overwriting it; if it doesn't exist, create it manually
• For more info, see the official doc

If your ISP does not conform to BCOP 690 (very common), and/or your router cannot route smaller blocks of IPv6 to one server even if it has been assigned a block of valid IPv6 addresses (also very common), the method above might not work for you. As a workaround, you can setup NAT with either Docker's builtin experimental IPv6 NAT support, robbertkl/docker-ipv6nat or similar projects. Manual iptables/nftables NAT setup is also possible, but hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.

Firstly, edit kernel parameters to enable IPv6 routing.

cat > /etc/sysctl.d/50-docker-ipv6.conf <<EOF
net.ipv6.conf.eth0.accept_ra=2
net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
net.ipv6.conf.default.forwarding=1
EOF
sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/50-docker-ipv6.conf

Notes:

• This potentially introduces more attack surface and might require you set up IPv6 firewall rules to make yourself safe
• This might break your network and your mileage may vary
• Swap eth0 with your primary network adapter name
• If you use static IPv6 assignment instead of SLAAC, change accept_ra to 0

Secondly, create a IPv6 NAT enabled network.

docker network create --ipv6 --subnet=fd00:a1a3::/48 ripe-atlas-network
docker run -d --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules:ro --cap-drop=ALL --cap-add=NET_RAW --cap-add=NET_ADMIN --cap-add=SYS_MODULE --net=host --name=ipv6nat robbertkl/ipv6nat:latest

Finally, start the RIPE Atlas container with argument --net=ripe-atlas-network.

Use this recipe for auto updating the docker container.

docker run --detach --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock --name watchtower containrrr/watchtower --cleanup --label-enable

Then start the RIPE Atlas container with argument --label=com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true.

All the config files are stored at /var/atlas-probe. Just backup it.

When the host distro is Debian 10 or similarly old ones, you might need to add --security-opt seccomp:unconfined to the docker run command to make things work. We don't recommend using EOL'ed distros.