Xtraceroute (Version 0.9.1)

What is that!

Xtraceroute is a graphical version of the traceroute program, which traces the route your IP packets travel to their destination.

This version shows that on a globe, as a series of yellow lines between 'sites', shown as small balls of different colors.

You can zoom, rotate, and move the globe around.

The picture on the right here shows the path between Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden (where I work and study) and www.berkeley.edu.

Here is a larger version of that picture.

1: What is that?

2: Why?

Well, it started as a way to learn OpenGL, and then gradually got out of hand.

3: System Requirements.

I have tested it on the following platforms:

Sun Ultra 1 model 170E with Creator 3D graphics (And bigger.) and Sun's own OpenGL implementation. It runs more or less perfect here.
Sun Ultra 1 model 170E with Creator 3D graphics and Brian Paul's Mesa(2.6) sort-of-OpenGL implementation, and while much slower than with Suns OpenGL, it's OK with a slightly smaller window.
Sun Sparc 5 with TGX graphics and Mesa, usable, but kind of slow, even with a small window.
A ppro-180 running Linux 2.0.32 with glibc. (Speed is OK-ish.)
An SGI Onyx2 with InfiniteReality graphics and a CAVE. (Speed? Heh...)

Other people have reported that they got it to work on some other platforms:

Linux machines with Voodoo cards.
FreeBSD (on i386)
Some other SGI machines

Some features can be turned off or replaced with faster (and uglier) ones if you want to increase performance on a slow computer.

Other than a fairly fast machine you'll need:

An OpenGL implementation.
GTK, the Gimp Toolkit.
traceroute.
GtkGLArea, an OpenGL widget for GTK. (Note:older versions (pre 0.8.11) of xtraceroute used gtkGL, another OpenGL widget, available here.)
gdk-pixbuf , a library used to load different kinds of image files. (You probably already have this if you have Gnome.)
The "host" command. There are two different versions of it:
- The one that's included with BIND. This is likely to be installed on your system already.
- This version, by Erik Wassenaar. (I've got a mirror of this package here.)
Either of them works with Xtraceroute, but I like Erik's version better for general usage.

4: Where can I get it?

Right here!

Debian packages are available here, thanks to Ola Lundqvist and Stephane Bortzmeyer!

The FreeBSD "port" is here.

Note: The packages and the BSD "port" might not be the latest version yet.

First public release! (8-May-01998)

This does not mean that this is a finished program. Please report any errors you find. It has been tested to work, at least for a while, and after some makefile tweaks, on the platforms above, so the worst nonportable stuff should be fixed, but I'm sure there's some stuff left in there.

The big news is that NDG Software gave me permission to distribute their database files. That improves the accuracy of the program a great deal.

GNU Configure in 0.8.13!

Well I finally got around to setting up configure so it should be much easier to install now.

RFC1876 finally in 0.9.0!

At last... Other cool new features include zoom and satellites.

Night and day in 0.9.1

And a few other small features. It now works with either BIND's or Erik's version of the host program, and some layout changes.

5: How does it work?

It gets all the site names from traceroute, and then it checks them out against the DNS, and a few small databases of names, IP-numbers, networks, and geographical coordinates. If it can't find them there, it tries to make a clever guess. Then it plots them on the globe.

Other stuff

Sven Goethel made a patch against 0.9.0 that adds lookups against CAIDA's NetGeo database. The patch is here, and Sven writes btw: before doing the "sh configure/make/install" thing, the netgeo perl stuff must be "perl Makefile.PL/make/make install" 'ed.

This functionality will be in the next minor version.

Björn Augustsson

Last modified: Thu Mar 4 23:20:33 MET 1999