Understanding Networks - TraceRoute

by Simon M. Jensen - September 25, 2018

This week in Understanding Networks our assignment was to explore the TraceRoute commando. TraceRoute is a computer network diagnostic tool displaying paths and measuring transit delays of packets across an IP network.

TraceRoute can be used from the command line and returns information such as: Hop number, Round trip time (RTT), Name and IP-address. However the overview you get in the command line can be hard to interpret.

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TraceRoute as it looks from the commandLine

There are many pages out there visualizing the traceRoute information - Monitis is one of these.

For this weeks assignment I decided that I wanted to build my own TraceRoute.app - mapping information from my Domain searches to a map. I wanted to build it in node - since I am still familiarizing myself with this library.

How I imagined it to work: A npm library called ‘nodejs-traceroute’ would return the Ip-address from the different “hops”. An API called Ip-api would provide additional information such as geolocation and provider for each Ip-address - this would be added to a map. (The information returned from the Ip-API is shown in the following image.

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In my node app, I passed information from each HOP into the API and loaded the returned information into the browser using express. In the browser I used mappa.js, a canvas wrapper for maps, to create a map and imported name, latitude and longitude of each Ip-address into the sketch to get an idea of how paths of IP networks are connected. The app would enable me to type a domain and see the request travel through the world. I ran into a lot of code-related issues along the way and will need more time to refine functions, provide better information on the map and change the user-input. However, this early version still provides some helpful visual feedback to the topic and is useful as a tool for my own use.

This video shows how the app currently works, displaying a traceRoute request to a government page in Russia.

There was a lot of learning from working on this project in node. Also, when running traceRoute over and over again you tend to see some “network patterns”.

A few observations:

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The code for this project can be found here