Show HN: My Project, One month later | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My Project, One month later

traceroute.im

37 pointsiSloth25 comments

You could make it more educational by explaining what some of the terms on the page mean.

For example, I don't currently know what the ASN is.

The top-10 lists are amusing, and I'd make the results there links to the engine so we can avoid having to type 127.0.0.1 to see what happens.

Ah :-)

"Autonomous System numbers (ASNs) are globally unique identifiers for Autonomous Systems."

I'd also add some information as to where/why the origin of the trace route is - I'm not sure how useful it is to have it come from some random location in France for me.

I plan to add multiple locations over the next week or so, you will be able to select where you want the source to be, or have multiple sources :)

ASN: autonomous system number, it's basically the ISP your traffic is routing through.

Thanks for the idea, will add some tool tips to the page, also I plan to have a link on the ASN so you can see the more detailed ISP information.

Clickable link in the stats page, added :)

Check out also Geo Trace: http://geotrace.linkstore.ru

Pretty nifty idea, i'd be interested in having something along these lines in my project (We're doing website monitoring http://www.verelo.com and provide a basic traceroute when something goes wrong)

Have you considered selling this as a service to someone like say, me? I'd be pretty great for us to do an api request for a traceroute, and get back a json response of the route data and maybe a link which displays the image.

Just an idea.

Thanks for the feedback it's greatly appreciated, your idea should actually be simple to implement, as all data is stored in json format for archival and just processed back to html when requested (e.g. http://saved.route.im/aafe)

I will have a play around with an API and see what comes of it :)

Get in contact with me if you would like to discuss further, contact link at bottom of website.

Fired you a note :-)

I don't think this works as i imagined it would, it differs from tracert(command prompt), i always get some weird connections from usa or germany/france while i traceroute.im my local sites (slovenia), tracert(command prompt) doesn't show these, see what im getting at?

Great idea btw, reminds me of uplink i always wanted to see that for real.

Traceroute.im perfroms a traceroute from the traceroute.im server to the site you specify. The local tracert program performs a traceroute from your computer to the site you specify. Additionally, tracert (windows variant) usually does ICMP probes while I assume traceroute.im uses Linux traceroute and thus UDP probes, but that shouldn't change the route your trace takes.

Fairly neat, bug report: Tracing a route to Japan that goes through the US ends up with a line just going off to the left: http://i.imgur.com/TXlE0.png

Thanks will look into that.

FYI - all results have a saved link, no need to screenshot :)

Example of yours - http://saved.route.im/a584

The IP I checked is in New Jersey. So it was kind of close.

http://saved.route.im/aacf

The problem with visualization of traceroute results is that it needs a very reliable GEO-IP database. They exist, but are very expensive. Hops that are not in cities (but in some ocean) are often placed in the city of the owner of the router. With the rise of IPv6 this only becomes worst.

Idea: make it so that when you hover the mouse over one of the lines on the map, the corresponding "Hop" row is highlighted and vice versa.

Great idea and I will look into it, not sure how 'easy' it will be though :)

Thanks for all your comments from when this was last posted, one month has since been and gone, there has been quite a few updates in response to the comments.

I would be grateful for your comments again, negative and positive comments are welcomed equally.

I missed this the first time, perhaps you could provide a link to the HN thread from a month ago.

Sure, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3399364

You have a typo in the graph header, "Responce Average". What might be good is showing reverse DNS lookup if the IP is specified (or even for domain if it is different).

Sorry, missed your comment, have now fixed :)

Will look at adding the feature as well.

Wow very neat! I love the visualization! Are you going to possibly add an api in the future?

Yes there will defiantly be an API coming soon, please contact me via the link at the bottom of the website if you would like to be updated when it's released ;)

I did! Thanks!

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