My 2 hour morning project, route.im | Hacker News Reader

My 2 hour morning project, route.im

route.im

36 pointsiSloth28 comments

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!

Thanks for the comments, I certainly understand it's nothing break though or even orignal, here's a list of many other people doing the same - http://www.traceroute.org/

I work as a network admin for a large UK internet service provider and hosting company, troubleshooting network faults can be very interesting when your actually on the same network, obviously your not getting a true perspective that matches an 'off net' client issue.

Most of the routers/servers that I manage and have access to are also 'on net', so while they do supply the tools I need, they still aren't really giving me an accurate view.

So I have my own servers dotted around the internet, but logging into them takes time etc, I just find it easier and faster to open my browsers bookmark and type in the destination.

Finally I can also give other people access to the service, such as clients, other network admins or anyone really, even you :)

I'm still not convinced of the benefit though - unless you are using it to find the route back to the machine you are trying to diagnose (in which case it would be useful to have a button to pre-fill the text box with the person's public IP).

Good luck, as I said - I don't want to be negative, just puzzled by this.

Thanks for the comments, 'negative' are often more helpful than positive comments anyway :) and I certainly like the idea of pre filling with the users public IP.

I realise that the tool wont match everyones requirements, to be honest I made it for me and what I use it for, if other people find it useful thats a bonus! Also if I can improve it to match what people want that's even better.

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.

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.

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.

Ultimately that's my goal, to have multiple locations displayed from a single search.

Just need to do some more coding, and then find a few cheap VPSs to get it live.

3rd you. I can do that on my console. For a moment I thought that it's something related to IMs routing.

I second that

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

In light of the traffic, I have added some stats

http://route.im/stats.php

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

Wasn't quite expecting that much traffic :)

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

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

Says trace complete and no shows no results.

Should be fixed now :)

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

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

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

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