5 ms·
Show HN: Traceroute Visualizer
This nifty tool plots the traceroute results and shows you the RTT as well as the distance travelled by the packets!
Supports MTR, flyingroutes and of course, traceroute.
The existing solutions were too limited so I made that.
Let me know if you have any feedback
- idanatomix 1y agoThis is great! Really loved the tool, I would probably position the map over the table tbh..
- PranaFlux 1y agoThanks for the feedback! It's true that the first's job is to visualize - we can read the details after
- PranaFlux 1y agoAdded :)
- idanatomix 1y agoMuch nicer :) i used it few time already!
- don_searchcraft 1y agoThis is pretty sweet, nice job. i dig the mapping visualization.
- PranaFlux 1y agoMuch appreciated!
- Meph504 1y agoI'm not sure if this worked as intended when tracert to google.com I get my IP, skips 13 hops, then 10 unknowns?
- OlivOnTech 1y agoI'm on my phone, maybe your site would benefit having sample data available to showcase what it can do?
- csmantle 1y agoI believe they already provided "Standard traceroute example", "Flyingroutes example (with protocol breakdown)" and "MTR example (with packet loss and timing statistics)".
- runjake 1y agoBut you have to copy those examples from another spot in the post and paste it into the box that is already populated with placeholder information. And for whatever reason, copy and paste on the page is flakey and required several retries on my iPhone running iOS 26.
- PranaFlux 1y agoI added a Load sample button so you can test it easily
- Lalo-ATX 1y agodidn't work for me at all. auto-detected my IPv4 addy, but my tracert to google.com went over IPv6. I'm pretty skeptical about being able to geolocate router interfaces from IP addresses, so I was curious about the output. My expectations were low but they were too high. Oh well.
- observationist 1y agoIn principle, if you ping from multiple known interfaces and paths, you can infer probable location, with confidence going up with the more known points of reference you have. You can do a little calculation and triangulation based off of latency and responsive known targets traversing the same path as the endpoint you're trying to geolocate, and get a very high confidence result for zip code, city, or maybe even 3-4 block radius, if there are a bunch of ISPs in the region. Even with only 3-4 ISPs, by sourcing from different directions along different networks you can get more resolution in the final estimated radius for geolocation. You can even use a whole bunch of fuzzy rough estimations for endpoints in a region to get progressive increments in resolution until you're happy with a precise location. You can also use educated guesses about the type of router at each hop, then use response times and behaviors for pings coming from different directions at different times. If you can arrange to traverse a node and pump traffic over it, you can use behavior with different types of traffic to elicit the type of router, the policies in place, and so on. It's a good idea to turn off responses to pings and minimize the amount of information available, even if it seems mostly harmless. The amount of information you can get from the public internet, just in terms of basic network utility functions and behaviors, is probably a lot more than most people ever consider.
- Lalo-ATX 1y agoTraceroute isn’t “ping,” it’s exploiting TTL manipulation to generate ICMP unreachables. You could do the long list of things you listed. Has anyone done a high-quality implementation of those things? And checked the results? I’d be interested in seeing that.
- observationist 1y ago
- kam 1y agoThe calls to the ipinfo.io API are blocked by Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection. No results for Location or ISP without turning that off.
- observationist 1y agoThe site is flagged as "phishing" by Palo Alto - submitted change request. edit: They updated from phishing to "computer and internet info" , no longer blocked.
- reincoder 1y agoThank you very much! I work for IPinfo. I am not super familiar with the platform, so it went under my radar. I appreciate the correction.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- reincoder 1y agoI work for IPinfo. I did not know that our site was blocked by Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection. Not sure what I can do here. The project takes the IP addresses you have provided from your traceroute and gets the information related to them from our website using a frontend HTTP call.
- jeroenhd 1y agoEnhanced Tracking Protection is using the Disconnect domain list. ipinfo.io is listed in services-relay.json and mdl-services-relay.info, which I believe makes the Disconnect.me product route requests to these domains through their proxies to prevent IP fingerprinting. Should be noted that IPInfo doesn't get blocked with tracking protection set to "standard". Users have to set tracking protection to "strict" to run into this issue. When they do this, they get warned that this setting may break sites. I don't think Mozilla/Disconnect will make an exception because privacy-infringement is a potential risk with a service like yours if used by malicious websites. I wouldn't put too much effort into this, the people affected by this are a fraction of a fraction of the general web audience and they've already seen a warning that websites may break because of their choice.
- Jenny858 1y ago[dead]
- tonymet 1y agoI love more tooling and attention given to latency . Throughput gets the attention but latency is what drives a high quality experience
- bpbp-mango 1y agoI don't think it works with Windows tracert output edit: edited my windows traceroute to match the linux format and it works nicely. great tool.
- PranaFlux 1y agoYou can now use your windows tracert outputs directly!
- protocolture 1y agoHmm, I dont feel like this is a good use of traceroute. Its already kind of nebulous, what with MPLS no-decrement-ttl and tunneling protocols. Add to that geo ip is often fantastically wrong. Especially if the ISP has no need for it for its own troubleshooting. They might not go out of their way to update geoip correctly, relying on the routers hostname for information. Blowing it up to display it on a map and pretend like the data returned from traceroute is aligned with reality rubs me the wrong way.
- PranaFlux 1y agoThe aim was to scratch an itch which was to try to visually see what is going on with my packets when going to a given website. Of course it's not perfectly reliable (due to geoip loc or hops not answering / using link IPs) nor does it claim to be.
- reincoder 1y agoI work for IPinfo and provided the data for it. The original intention for the project was to identify data center locations. The original idea of the project came from https://stefansundin.github.io/traceroute-mapper/ https://stefansundin.github.io/traceroute-mapper/. I reworked it and then OP added a lot of bells and whistles. For my day-to-day work, I still use my version. I manage approximately 1,200 PoPs that are part of IPinfo's ProbeNet platform, which is used to generate our internet measurement data. We, in turn, use this data to produce the IP geolocation data you utilize. The issue is that the servers we manage can be moved to different locations or not be in the advertised locations. We operate these PoPs across 500 cities. Whenever the PoP fails to meet certain physical location checks, I run basic diagnostic tests to determine where the server is located and where it is not. Aside from running ping and traceroute operations to the target servers, I can run traceroutes to certain IP addresses whose paths I am familiar with. A traceroute visualizer provides a visual interface, information on the ASN, the geolocation, and the time measurements. This provides an intuitive view of where the server "could not be" located rather than could be located. We use several techniques to run basic diagnostic tests. This traceroute visualizer isn't an official test of IPinfo; it is something I vibe-coded together. There are far better internal tools, such as running ping and traceroutes across all of our ~1,200 servers simultaneously. It is a network diagnostic tool. I think based on your comment, it is not just a tool, it is more of an abstraction of a tool! But it is somewhat useful I thinkl. I am happy to hear your thoughts. I manage these servers and we are trying our best to improve our data consistently. So, any ideas or even random thoughts you might have can help us improve.
- thelastgallon 1y agoTraceroute isn't real, or: Whoops! Everyone Was Wrong Forever: https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm
- abhgh 1y agoHadn't seen this before, very nice read, thank you!
- jacquesm 1y agoNice idea, but shoddy implementation, it does not properly detect the starting point based on my IP and the route shown is not matching what I know about the physical topology of the network in this region. You probably should ask infrastructure providers if they are willing to give you access to the endpoint and physical routes rather than just to use geolocation for IP addresses resulting in errors and unrealistic routes. There are only a couple of players in that space, and I think they sell the data. Otoh, given the current situation with attacks on infrastructure they might not be willing to accommodate a party without a strict need.
- PranaFlux 1y agoWould you mind sharing the link (after removing the data you don't want to share)? I'm using IPInfo's data and each hop IP is the end of a segment so it's normal it doesn't follow your expected topology (to which we can add the limitations of traceroute)
- jacquesm 1y agoNot much point, really, it only detects one hop correctly the rest is garbage. So all that's left is my home IP address, and that gets placed well over a 100 km from where I actually am. I don't mind :)
- reincoder 1y agoI work for IPinfo and we provided the data for the project. I would really appreciate your insight on this. We run ping and traceroute operations from 1,200 servers across the world to every (within reason) IP address out there. So, we have ping RTT and traceroute data history of these measurements. Considering the physical network topology does not match the physical network topology, we would love to hear your thoughts. Unrouted IP addresses do not appear on the internet traffic, and we have limited network data for them. If you can share your traceroute output and obfuscate as much data as possible, we will be happy to investigate and share feedback.
- regsvr32 1y agoNeat project! The instant map visualization makes it much easier to grok what's happening on the wire compared to just reading out hops and ping times.
- PranaFlux 1y agoThanks!
- preinheimer 1y agoLove it, I'm still often surprised by how long a hop can be. e.g. I'm looking at one from France to Singapore. If you're looking to trace to something far away when doing a demo we've got servers in ~280 cities around the world so <random large city>.wonderproxy.com works. e.g. taipei.wonderproxy.com or santiago.wonderproxy.com, berlin, newyork, etc.
- PranaFlux 1y agoHappy you like it!