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Tracing Paths Through the Internet

A utility called traceroute probes the paths that data packets take through the Internet, recording all the "hops" (routers) along the way. The original traceroute was written by Van Jacobson at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in USA. It is an important tool for exploring and mapping the structure of the global Internet.

The normal output from traceroute is a text listing of the hops. As an example we used the Windows 95 traceroute utility (called tracert) to run a trace to the Atlas mirror site in the US at www.cybergeography.com. This took 14 hops from my machine in London. 

C:\>tracert www.cybergeography.com

Tracing route to www.cybergeography.com [209.8.64.161]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    10 ms   <10 ms   <10 ms  cisco-2.bart.ucl.ac.uk [128.40.59.245]
  2    10 ms    40 ms    10 ms  128.40.255.53
  3   <10 ms   <10 ms   <10 ms  128.40.20.254
  4   <10 ms   <10 ms   <10 ms  atmr-ulcc.lonman.net.uk [194.83.100.62]
  5   <10 ms   <10 ms   <10 ms  atmr-ulcc.lonman.net.uk [194.83.100.62]
  6   <10 ms    70 ms    40 ms  tglobe-gw2.ja.net [193.63.94.80]
  7    91 ms    90 ms    90 ms  Teleglobe.net [207.45.215.201]
  8    80 ms    90 ms   101 ms  Teleglobe.net [207.45.215.2]
  9    90 ms   130 ms   110 ms  gin-nyy-ac1.Teleglobe.net [207.45.199.233]
 10   110 ms   110 ms   110 ms  gin-nyy-bb1.Teleglobe.net [207.45.201.33]
 11   111 ms   120 ms   170 ms  gin-maee-bb1.Teleglobe.net [207.45.223.2]
 12   150 ms   121 ms   140 ms  mae-east.cais.com [192.41.177.85]
 13   120 ms   120 ms   111 ms  hssi12-0.mcl1.cais.net [209.8.159.26]
 14   110 ms   120 ms   120 ms  209.8.64.161

Trace complete.

There are a number of graphical traceroute utilities that lay out the route as a graph, but do not map the geographical locations of routers. A neat example of a graphical traceroute is Neotrace from Neoworx, shown below running the same trace as above, to the mirror site at www.cybergeography.com.

This example is VisualRoute, an excellent traceroute utility that maps the router locations onto the real-world, as well as showing you the details of each hop in table.

Try the new VisualRoute Server for web-based geographic traceroute from the Datametrics server.

tracemap from MIDS / Alexa is a Web-based geographical traceroute. The traces run from Alexa in California. The map shows a trace to UCL in London. Tracemap also produces a table of hops and a graph of the times for the trace.

A map produced by GeoBoy, a geographical traceroute program that uses a 3d global interface, from the Network Design Group (NDG). In this example, it is tracing the route from Australia to Microsoft in Seattle.

WhatRoute, a graphical and geographical traceroute utility for the Mac created by Bryan Christianson, IHUG.

Xtraceroute is a 3D geographical traceroute being developed for unix machines by Björn Augustsson

For more information on traceroute see Jack Rickard's article "Mapping the Internet with Traceroute" (Boardwatch Magazine, December 1996).

[ Introduction | Conceptual | Artistic | Geographic | Cables & Satellites | Traceroutes | Census
| Topology | Info Maps | Info Landscapes | Info Spaces | ISP Maps | Web Site Maps | Surf Maps | Historical ]


(© Copyright - Martin Dodge, 1999)