XTRACEROUTE(1)XTRACEROUTE(1)NAMExtraceroute - graphical (X11) traceroute
SYNOPSISxtraceroute [options] [hostname]
DESCRIPTION
This manual page briefly documents the xtraceroute, command. This man‐
ual page was originally written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution
because the original program does not have a manual page. Since then
the author has gotten his act together and keeps it up to date.
xtraceroute is a graphical version of the traceroute program, which
traces the route your IP packets travel to their destination.
On the display:
* Green dots have good location information that came from LOC fields
in the DNS, which is the best data out there.
* Orange ones has been guessed from the sites' suffix.
* Yellow ones got resolved via a database of city names and "known"
routers. That data is old and inaccurate and it's not getting any
younger.
* Red ones are completely unknown.
* You can select dots by clicking on them both on the globe and in the
list.
* Pressing and holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse will
rotate the globe. Using the middle mouse button will move it, and the
right mouse button will zoom it (only vertical movement counts). You
can generally get the view you want this way.
ARGUMENTS
hostname is the name (or IP address) of the host you are interested in.
OPTIONS
The program follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options
starting with two dashes (`-').
--version
Show version number
-h, --help
Display a brief help text.
-T, --texture texture-name
Use a custom texture (map). It can be any kind of file that
gdk_pixbuf can load (which is most reasonable formats). There
are a few really good textures on http://www.radcy‐
berzine.com/xglobe/ (Meant for use with Xglobe, but they'll work
fine here as well.)
-N, --ntexture texture-name
Use a custom texture (map) for the part of the earth that's not
lit by the sun.
--night, --no-night
Do/Don't use the night texture where appropriate. The default is
to do an all-day earth.
--LOD number
Set the level-of-detail for the sphere. (The default is 3, 0-4
are realistic values.)
--stdin, -
Makes the program read data from stdin instead of calling
traceroute(8) (Mainly useful for debugging)
CAVEATSxtraceroute tries hard to guess the location of machines, but it is
just software, it doesn't know everything, and it makes mistakes.
The yellow dots has been guessed by looking at the top level domain
(TLD) of the hostname. This works fairly well for most countries, but
there's a few exceptions where some small countries (like Niue (.nu)
and Tuvalu (.tv)) will let anyone register domains in their space for a
fee. I don't care, If it says .nu and it hasn't got a LOC record, it'll
get plotted in Niue. Also, very few US sites actually use the .us TLD.
If it finds a very high-latency link, it will assume it it a satellite
hop and plot it accordingly. If you have some other kind of slow link,
like PPP over something slow or a really busy router, it might show up
as a satellite hop as well.
FILES
/usr/share/xtraceroute/earth.png
Default texture for the earth.
/usr/share/xtraceroute/night.png
Default night-time texture for the earth.
/usr/share/xtraceroute/xtraceroute-resolve-location.sh
This is a script that xtraceroute uses to get data on sites in a
nice asynchronous way. It's not very interesting by itself.
/usr/share/xtraceroute/site_hosts.cache
System-wide hosts file (optional)
/usr/share/xtraceroute/site_networks.cache
System-wide networks file (optional)
The two files above are filled in by hand, following the model of
/usr/lib/xtraceroute *.cache files.
$HOME/.xt/user_hosts.cache
Your personal hosts file
$HOME/.xt/user_networks.cache
Your personal networks file
$HOME/.xt/user_generic.cache
Your personal base of regular expressions
These three personal files are typically filled in via the Database
menu.
LOC data
The Correct Way to tell the geographical location of a host on the
internet is to ask the DNS. The way to do that is described in RFC1876,
which defines the LOC (for location) RR. It's not exactly widely used,
but you see it every now and then. Hopefully this program can help
change that.
How to get LOC data for your site into the DNS:
Ask your local sysadmin that maintain your nameserver to read the RFC.
It's a fairly easy read as RFCs go, but it might help if you find out
the location of your site in advance using, say, a GPS or a site like
http://www.mapblast.com. Sysadmins are busy people.
When xtraceroute tries to resolve a hostname it will try the proper
name first, and then higher domains. For example if our hostname is
"apa.bepa.cepa.com", it will try that, "bepa.cepa.com" and "cepa.com".
(But not just "com")
This means that if you're a big site and it's hard to persuade the
admins to add individual LOC entries for all machines, you can try get‐
ting them to add one or two for the whole domain.
SEE ALSOtraceroute(8)
More information on xtraceroute is in /usr/doc/xtraceroute.
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Stephane Bortzmeyer
<bortzmeyer@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be
used by others). Xtraceroute was written by Bj�rn Augustsson
<d3august@dtek.chalmers.se>.
BUGS
Please send bug reports to Bj�rn Augustsson
<d3august@dtek.chalmers.se>.
Xtraceroute 0.9.1 2002-Oct-24 XTRACEROUTE(1)
