Comment by protocolture
Comment by protocolture 8 hours ago
Hmm, 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.
I 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/. 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.