

My 2 hour morning project, route.im - iSloth
http://route.im/

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elliottcarlson
While I would hate to discourage anyone from mini-projects - what is the
purpose of a web-based traceroute interface? It's available on most operating
systems, and even on routers; and the purpose of traceroute is to do network
diagnostics for your own network to a remote system. In the end this tool will
not really do much but show the route from your server to a remote IP.

Sorry - not trying to be negative - would love to be enlightened if there is
something that I am missing!

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smallegan
Agreed, I think this could be much more interesting/useful if there were a
variety of servers in different parts of the world to choose from.

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elliottcarlson
It really wouldn't make it more useful as it would still only show the hops
from those specific servers to an end destination - which may or may not share
any hops with my route to said end-destination. The only real use I could see
would be as a "is this site up" service, or a tool to check propagation of a
domain name in other parts of the world - but, that's where utilizing
nameserver lookups would be quicker and less resource intensive than a
traceroute lookup.

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iSloth
Multiple trace route sources for what I do is very helpful, for example:

A client reports an issue that some of their website visitors are having
packet loss/reachability issues, however the network I am working on has 3
transit providers, which means 3 different ways into the network.

I can certainly do a trace route from my machine or routers to their clients
(if i know their IP) but that's only showing me the outbound route, I am still
none the wiser as to which route they are trying to get in via.

By using multiple off-net trace routes I can probably enter my core network
over each of the 3 transit providers. Looking at these results I should be
able to see if there are any obvious issues with incoming traffic.

It's certainly not going to work every time, however it will give me a better
view as to what's going on.

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richardk
Hmm, I was expecting some new/fun kind of output, for instance some map that
approximates the route taken geographically.

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iSloth
Sorry to disappoint, although hopefully it's a base to improve on with ideas
like yours :)

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jamesmoss
Suggestion: Make the URL hackable. If I go to
<http://traceroute.im/ycombinator.org> I should see a traceroute for
ycombinator.org. Check out <http://who.is> for good example of this.

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iSloth
Thanks for the comments, I will be implementing that some time later today.

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JoeAltmaier
Can take quite a while; would be nice to update continuously as the console
version does.

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iSloth
The traceroute has to finish before PHP is able to display the content,
hopefully I can use Ajax to make it more realistic. Thanks for the comments!

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raheemm
Sysadmin here - I'll be using this. It would be great if you showed geographic
info for each hop on the command line. And if you are really ambitious, make a
graphical traceroute that is displayed on a map.

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iSloth
I love the geographic idea, will try plugin a GeoIP database, I also want to
show the ASN for each IP range to make things easier.

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shreeshga
TIL about <http://www.paris-traceroute.net/a-new-traceroute> [better
traceroute to handle loadbalancers]

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iSloth
In light of the traffic, I have added some stats

<http://route.im/stats.php>

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iSloth
Done some changes to the script and web server, should be a bit more stable
now.

Wasn't quite expecting that much traffic :)

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Nicolas___
Looks like you somehow remove the '-' characters in the domain names.

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iSloth
Thanks for finding that, was my security getting a bit too secure, should be
fixed now :)

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verroq
Says trace complete and no shows no results.

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iSloth
Should be fixed now :)

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haakon666
It also says trace complete with no output if you put an ipv6 address in.

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iSloth
Sorry missed your comment, fixed that now, the ':' was been filtered out.

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necenzurat
some realtime loading would be nice, axaj, jq and others :)

