10 Jul 2008 03:53
DNS traceroute study [OT]
Chris GauthierDickey <chrisg <at> cs.du.edu>
2008-07-10 01:53:38 GMT
2008-07-10 01:53:38 GMT
Dear all, [This is OT, having nothing to do with GNUnet.] I would like your help for a study on Internet topologies and its relation to DNS reliability. The goal is to do a traceroute from each site to all 40900 DNS start-of-authority (SOA) servers worldwide. For this work, we are trying to run traceroutes from as many different Internet sites as possible. Hence I would really appreciate it if you would be able to run a simple piece of code (described below) on one of your Linux/UNIX systems and send me the output. Running it on your home ISP as well as at work would also be valuable (however; running it on two different systems at the same organization would not be useful). I have compiled a set of shell scripts that will run traceroute and collect the data in a format suitable for our analysis. The scripts only need permission to run traceroute (often available for normal users on most systems) and "awk". The script will run for about a week (!) using only a few minutes of CPU time in total (running traceroute in parallel, even with only a tiny amount of parallelism on some test networks caused ISPs to drop packets changing the results). The script produces a data.tar.gz-file with the results (4 MB after compression, less than 20 before). While some (clueless) administrators sometimes "mind" being traceroutes, the scripts should in no way pose a security risk for anyone and I am not aware of any competent administrator that would mind this particular experiment. The amount of CPU and bandwidth used is also miniscule (it could easily be supported by an 80386 with an old phone modem at, say, 33 kbps). The 335 kb shell script archive can be found at(Continue reading)
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