Visual Traceroute (VTRACE)

Introduction

Visual Traceroute is a new feature that can be accessed by calling reflector.cgi with function=vtrace. Currently it can provide visual traceroute from 5 PingER monitors:

1. www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu, SLAC National Accelerator Lab, near San Francisco, California, USA
2. pinger.cern.ch, CERN, Geneva Switzerland
3. maggie1.seecs.edu.pk, National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
4. mel-a-ext1.aarnet.net.au, Australia's Academic and Research Network, Melbourne, Australia
5. pinger.fsksm.utm.my, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

It works by first finding the traceroute to the target using the traceroute.pl installed at the monitoring node and then geolocating each of the intermediate hop routers using TULIP. It can be accessed from http://tulip.slac.stanford.edu or here.

We use TULIP's dynamic ping-based geolocation as compared to say database methods such as used by MaxMind derived tools like GeoIPTools, since often router locations in the database tend to be given as at the corporate HQ that owns the routers (e.g. ESnet routers may supposedly be located in Berkeley).

Performance

Normally it would take about 10 mins to perform a complete visual traceroute but we have incorporated caching to speed up the process. As the router locations are found they are automatically cached in /nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/tulip/cachetr/cache.txt

If the location of all the routers in the requested vtrace are cached then it takes only about 10 secs to give the output.

Design

The tabular traceroute is shown together with the Autonomous System Number (ASN), if known, and router's location coordinates. Clicking on the IP address will take you to the TULIP geolocation utility. Clicking on the ASN will provide information on the ASN. 

Two traceroute paths are shown on the google map. One (shown in red) is drawn using TULIP and the other (shown in blue) is drawn using MaxMind (an IP host location database). The hops are shown as appropriate numbered markers, the error in the estimated location is shown as a red circle. See the figure below:

This figure shows the traceroute from SLAC to NUST Pakistan. http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/reflector.cgi?function=vtrace&target=nust.edu.pk

Comparisons between MaxMind and TULIP

This presentation was sent to Harvey.

University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur to NUST Islamabad	NUST Islamabad to University of Malaya	CERN to NUST	Melbourne to NUST	Melbourne to CERN	Melbourne to SLAC	CERN to UCSD

SLAC to CERN	SLAC to ICTP Trieste	SLAC to NUST	SLAC to UCSD	SLAC to Melbourne	SLAC to Waikato New Zealand	SLAC to U Oregon