Traceroute Games

This post is actually taken from and email that I wrote to some friends (late last December) who like this kind of stuff. I went searching through my email, looking for what it was that I did with pydot and graphviz just a while back, and I realized I never blogged about it, and I should have ;-)

A few days after the Winter Solstice, I was screwing around with pydot (graphviz) and a custom traceroute python wrapper I threw together (Update: this is now available here). I wanted to graphically visualize multiple traceroutes and see the paths shared in common. This is part of a proof-of-concept for some monitoring ideas I have.

import pydot

from adytum.net import traceroute


hosts = ["www.google.com", "www.amazon.com", "www.aol.com", "www.cnet.com",
 "www.yahoo.com"]
linkedHosts = []

for host in hosts:
 trace = traceroute.Trace(host, useDNS=True, queries=5)
 trace.run()
 domains = trace.results.getLinkedDomains(subdomainLimit=2)
 linkedHosts.extend(domains)

graph = pydot.graphfromedges(linkedHosts, directed=True)
graph.write_png("traceroutes.png", prog="dot")