

Star Wars Traceroute - How I did it - sebkomianos
http://beaglenetworks.net/

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typicalbender
Holy center aligned code batman. Nice work though, wish I had been that
adventurous during the snow storm :)

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KMag
I wonder what a programming language would look like if it were intended to be
viewed center-aligned. That might be a fun snowstorm/CNY project for any
language geeks out there.

Edit: for those of you confused by the red envelopes and fire crackers, happy
Lunar New Year (CNY).

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Someone
Center aligned is too easy: <http://www.ioccc.org/1987/westley.c> (sorry,
couldn't resist)

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wilhil
They should have a new qualification - CCIE FG - (CCIE fun and games!).

I have seen a few highly qualified networking people do some funny things,
but, this has got to be the best by far!

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scrye
The upstreams had a valid route back to it, it just didnt have a valid forward
route - and thank goodness because the traceroute boxes got ddosed into
oblivion. This was a trick which ONLY used 1 ip address and some borrowed
PTRs. I could have used used space too, but the customers mail probably would
have stopped working. The source of the IP block is an ISP that gets a /20 at
a time. Its a fact of life that unused blocks do sit around.

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smsm42
The sad aftermath of the story:
[http://beaglenetworks.net/post/42828595476/what-i-learned-
fr...](http://beaglenetworks.net/post/42828595476/what-i-learned-from-being-a-
fleeting-internet-celeb)

Somebody apparently found it necessary to DDOS this harmless internet
curiosity so it does not exist anymore. A reminder that people can be
wonderful, and people can be just evil, I guess.

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xd
Nice example of PHP being put to use on the console.

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pella
related : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5192656>

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JMill
Video of Star Wars Traceroute: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPJELwSV1P0>

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andrewcooke
that's really interesting. i have a non-ccie question, though:

if it's sending packets on a dance through a virtual network, why does that
have to use public addresses? would using a private network (eg 10.0.0.0) not
have worked? why not? (and is it odd for people to still have unused /24 lying
around?)

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xorgar831
Because you're sending udp packets to each hop, if it were a private network
there would be no route to it.

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KMag
But the packets aren't addressed to the intermediate routers. All of the
packets are addressed to the endpoint, with a TTL value too low to make it
there. The intermediate routers just reply with an ICMP Time Exceeded packet.

The real problem is that an ICMP Time Exceeded packet coming from behind NAT
would presumably either be blocked by the NAT or else have its address changed
to the routable public interface of the NAT device. If the packets are
dropped, that would obviously be a problem. If the IP address were changed to
that of the NAT box, then all of the reverse DNS lookups would have the same
result.

By the way, some traceroute implementations use ICMP Echo Request packets
instead of UDP.

Edit: punctuation

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xorgar831
Oh right, yes, that's correct. It's the destination address that counts. EDIT:
@0x0 yes of course the DNS too.

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Evbn
I love the Rasmusesque PHP zen. "Hi. I am dumb. I don't write good programs, I
write programs that work."

Reminds me of Colombo.

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xd
Rasmusesque?

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sigzero
Rasmus is the creator of PHP. But yeah, Rasmusesque?

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whalesalad
Rasmus always claimed that he wasn't concerned with beautiful programming that
followed a common design pattern or methodology, rather he liked to get things
done and so much of PHP is designed in that way.

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gaius
There is an old proverb for this approach: penny wise, pound foolish.

