February 10th, 2013 at 3:28 pm by David Farrar
Do a traceroute to 216.81.59.173
Very cool.
H/T: Simon Allard
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Fun Things
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February 10th, 2013 at 3:42 pm
“when CCIE’s get bored” – very good indeed (albeit as geeky as you suggested.)
Vote:February 10th, 2013 at 3:43 pm
Seems like Kiwiblog is shifting from a Right-wing blog to a Nerd blog.
Vote:February 10th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
On Windows machines use,
Vote:tracert 216.81.59.173
February 10th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
@hamnida,
Can you be sure it is not a right-wing, neolib conspiracy to disenfranchise and oppress you (and others like you) by restricting knowledge and debate to a ruling elite?
Vote:February 10th, 2013 at 4:16 pm
Love it!
Vote:February 10th, 2013 at 5:16 pm
tl;dr
Vote:February 10th, 2013 at 5:50 pm
Because only nerds use computers?
Anyway, since when was this a right-wing blog?
Vote:February 10th, 2013 at 6:12 pm
Nice. I’ll run this again when my Death Star Tea Infuser arrives: http://theawesomer.com/death-star-tea-infuser/185979/
Vote:February 10th, 2013 at 7:21 pm
Cool – but having just googled it can anyone explain what it is I saw and how it was done so I can be in real awe of the geeks.
Vote:February 10th, 2013 at 8:51 pm
Dammit I had to learn sumfink to do that! I hate it when I have to burn info to my redundant capacity!
Vote:February 11th, 2013 at 7:54 am
Michael, a traceroute tries to determine the ip address and name of computer your packet passes before it arrives at the final destination.
So you can see what path it takes.
In a bit more depth: if you sent something to another computer, it is not send there straight-away, but you send it to a computer that might now where it can be send. That computer, in its turn, sends it to computer it thinks might now where to deliver it. Etc. Every step is called a hop. On your network your packet would first go to your wifi router, the wifi router sends it to the server from your ISP it is connect to, this will send it to the server that connects your ISP to another ISP etc.
So a traceroute prints the names of all these computers.
Technically it is not immediately obvious how they get the names/descriptions you see, as usually names should be like a.co.nz or b.net.nz etc. That’s the real cool part.
Vote:February 11th, 2013 at 10:12 am
It works by using the time to live counter. Each network node a message passes through deducts one from the TTL. Once the TTL goes to zero the node replies to the sender saying TTL expired at ip address of node. The sender starts by sending with TTL = 1, then 2, 3 etc. That way the sender discovers the path through the network. The traceroute or tracert (windows) program then does a DNS look up on each of the expiring node ip addresses to see if there is an associated DNS name. They have set up the ip addresses in the last few hops with DNS names to spell out the star wars stuff.
The names work because the names coughed up by DNS ptr records don’t have to be genuine DNS names. All you need is authority for the in-addr-arpa zone for the corresponding address block.
Vote:February 11th, 2013 at 10:59 am
Even cooler is this traceroute:
traceroute -m 64 216.81.59.173
Vote:February 11th, 2013 at 11:02 am
And the explanation is here: http://beaglenetworks.net/
Vote: