USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - 13th Systems Administration Conference - LISA '99
GTrace - A Graphical Traceroute Tool
Ram Periakaruppan and Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado at Boulder and Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis
Abstract
Traceroute [Jacobson88], originally written by Van
Jacobson in 1988, has become a classic tool for determining the routes
that packets take from a source host to a destination host. It does
not provide any information regarding the physical location of each
node along the route, which makes it difficult to effectively identify
geographically circuitous unicast routing. Indeed, there are examples
of paths between hosts just a few miles apart that cross the entire
United States and back, phenomena not immediately evident from the
textual output of traceroute. While such path
information may not be of much interest to many end users, it can
provide valuable insight to system administrators, network engineers,
operators and analysts. We present a tool that depicts geographically
the IP path information that traceroute provides,
drawing the nodes on a world map according to their latitude/longitude
coordinates.
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