Traceroute, written by Van Jacobson has become a classic
tool for determining the routes that packets take from a source host to
a destination host. While
traceroute has become a very handy
debugging tool, it does not provide any information on the physical
location of each node along the path. GTrace is a graphical front-end
to
traceroute that depicts geographically the IP path
information between source and destination hosts. It is written in Java
and works under the Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD platforms.
GTrace uses a combination of methods to either determine or guess at
the physical location of a node in the
traceroute path. It is
flexible enough to support addition of new databases, heuristics to map
IP addresses to physical location and maps.
- Flexible and extensible techniques determine the locations of nodes
along the path
- Multithreaded architecture allows locations for multiple hops to be
determined in parallel
- Validates location information, eliminating data judged
incorrect
- Indicates the method for determining geographic mapping and level
of trust in results
- Links to current whois information, for nodes along the
path
- View routes traced via third-party traceroute servers
- Allows user to zoom into various regions of the maps (Maps courtesy
of visualroute.com)
- Enables users to maintain trace archives
- Supports the addition of new maps and non-geographical network
diagrams
- Uses NetGeo service for mapping IP addresses to location. (netgeo.caida.org)
GTrace appeared at the
USENIX LISA '99 conference in November. You can read the
paper for more details on the architecture and
implementation. Development of this tool was partially funded by NSF
under ANI-9996248.