Map the Internet... In One Day?

rjbrown99 writes "There have been numerous stories over the past few years on Bill Cheswick's Internet Mapping Project. The Lumeta folks even created a company out of it. Well, now there is a competitor. A single guy with a single computer is working to accomplish the same feat - within ONE DAY and using open-source tools to do it. The new project is called Opte and can be found at www.opte.org." He's made some progress and is looking for volunteers.

Comments

Creepy

[Seanasy]

When I first saw the image on the right it looked like a human brain. It would be creepy if the Internet had a sort of fractal self-similarity to our physiology.

I have considered something similar

[fv]

As the author of the free Nmap ("Network Mapper") tool, I have also considered creating a map of the entire Internet. I would have focused on end hosts (where they are, what operating systems and services they run, trending, etc.) instead of routing. Rather than try this from a single high-bandwidth machine (as with Opte), I was going to take a distributed approach. I would release a P2P-like application that users could run and each scan small sections of network space to be contributed to the global database. The app would be called Nmapster :). I also liked to think about it as a "caching service", so that you don't have to spend the time rescanning the Microsoft network if someone else has done so in the last N hours.

Then I came to my senses and decided to work on more practical and less controversial projects such as Nmap Version Detection. But the subversive in me still hasn't given up entirely on Nmapster :).

-Fyodor