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Paper in nature on "Internet Tomography"
rafial writes "A
group called CADIA has
just published a paper in Nature that describes there work
on " Internet Tomography." Essentially they are firing large numbers of pings trough the Internet and analysing the results to analyze topology and performance. Lots of neat pictures, and they are using FreeBSD to conduct their research! "
Sweet looking stuff. Check it out.
Woohoo I'm first ( i think )
Great, I do a similar thing all the time to figure out why my Quakeworld game is running like crap, and these guys get published (or at least Web Published) in Nature..
A technical story on Slashdot.
CmdrTaco, this is the kind of thing we thrive on. Forget the Katz "I dropped my PC on my foot--do I see a doctor or a technician" and "MS Sucks!" articles.
RFC1876 relates to the use of MX records to show where a certain IP address is physically located. Now I spotted this paragraph in section 7 of the RFC, itself. "High-precision LOC RR information could be used to plan a penetration of physical security, leading to potential denial-of-machine attacks. To avoid any appearance of suggesting this method to potential attackers, we declined the opportunity to name this RR 'ICBM'." HEHE!!
I gather the Intelligence Agencies would like this implemented to make it easier to track down hackers on the net through this. Oppose it if you want your freedom to speak the truth.
Looking at the 2D representation of connections was very interesting. The structure and branched or tree like structure does look very much like natural phenomenon and I bet is quite comparable with some natural phenomenon ( maybe coral growth, modified snowflake growth or similar ).
Looks very much like a form of Eden growth which I studied in my applied math modelling and simulation courses or perhaps a cellular automata.
Man I wish I had linux back then!
Nice story Taco..keep em coming
Hey! Wait a minute... Reminds me of the novel Computer One by Warwick Collins. Good read. HAL is a cry-baby compared to that... :) -jon
What about the MIDS Internet Weather Report? This sort of thing has been running for ages. http://www3.mids.org/weather/
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
You don't have to give a hyper-accurate location. Just report the city. If you're still worried at that point, the black helicopters will chase you down before you can run far anyway...
I was looking around at the stuff CAIDA has on their web site. Very cool. The java app that shows the network pipes is, for me, awesome. I was thinking that a really killer application would be a traceroute that would interact real-time with a graphical geographical representation of the pipes it goes through. Maybe with a text window below the graphic w/ the traceroute output. Too bad I can't code to save my life.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
...pretty pictures, but the internet really does look like a cloud! or a clump of moss or some fractal generated by my screen saver.
I wonder if the software is available?
Are they accepting volunteers for additional "survey stations"?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
What is "rtt"?! (on the right side)
Cheops does something like this, although I found the display quickly became overwhelming.
here is another cool picture of the internet
Back when I was a boy, we called them globes.
KC (K. Claffy) was showing some of these pictures at an IETF last year and they were amazing then. One of the more interesting things was how pervasive (invasive?) Verio's networks were becoming.
She has also been giving reports at the IETF for several years on web cache performance at the IETF meetings. Finally someone is actually looking at real performance numbers on these networks....
(Yes I work for NSI. No I don't pretend to speak for them since they don't pretend to speak for me.)
you could get neotrace from
e .asp
http://www.neoworx.com/goonline/neotrace11_shar
trabic
Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice, Moderation in the cause of freedom is no virtue. --B.Goldwater
Actually, the Macintosh program WhatRoute has this function. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work very well, as the sever it gets the location data from is either slow or doesn't have info on many nodes, but when it *does* work, it's very cool.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
there is not much info available out there
to convert IP numbers to geographical locations...
unless everybody out there actually put
location information in their DNS records
(just the city the machine is located in
would be *loads* more useful than no info
at all).
more info from CAIDA about this (RFC 1876),
at http://www.caida.org/Tools/iptll.html
-nb