URL: http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/1999/GTrace/GTrace.pdf Entry Date: 2010-10-22 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.