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- Abilene "Weather Map"
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The starting point of Abilene is the network operation center. An animated "weather map" for aggregate traffic between Abilene core nodes is available on the home page and shows a rough idea of how congested the backbone links are. View a customized version of the weather map here. Figure 3 below shows a snapshot of the map on July 8 when the links were lightly loaded and two links (black lines) were down.

Figure 3. Abilene Weather Map on July 8, 1999 10:5914 EST

The Abilene web page also provides the current status of the Abilene routers, the backbone links, and the links between Abilene and peering networks. Another measurement service is the Abilene Core Node Router Proxy tool that submits commands to an Abilene core node router and gets the results back. Currently, there are 10 core node routers, each located in a different geographical area. The current service includes: showing the IP address, network interface, and routing table of the router; tracing routes to a host; and issuing a ping to a host. This information is helpful for network engineers to diagnose wide-area connectivity and routing problems.