Understanding Networks Wk 2-4: Traceroute

Live site: https://emilylin-itp.github.io/understanding-networks/traceroute_dir/index.html

Code here: https://github.com/emilylin-itp/understanding-networks/tree/gh-pages/traceroute_dir

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For this traceroute assignment, I used my traceroute data to create a spin-off of google maps. Calling it Traceroute Hop Stops!

I first collected the traceroute data from my home, school and a coffee shop. Next, I converted it into a json file.

I used https://www.iplocation.net/ to help to help me find the coordinates, city, ISP of each IP address that showed up in my traceroute. I noticed for each hop, traceroute will send three IP packets.

Helpful note I read from here: “Traceroute uses the TTL (Time to Live) field in the IP packet header. Normally, TTL is used to prevent packets from being forwarded forever when there is a routing loop. Whenever an IP packet is forwarded by a router, the TTL is decreased by one. When the TTL is zero, the IP packet will be discarded.”

With the json file, I was hoping to be able to dynamically alter the site by using AJAX xmlHttpRequest (as I did for my data art site). Unfortunately, I was struggling to get it to work in time. So, a lot of the data is manually inputted in HTML (I know, it is definitely not the smartest way of doing this). It is also not utilizing my json files!  I’m hoping to simplify my code in the following week so I don’t have endless lines of HTML.

Included an overview map with all the major ISP that keep coming up in my traceroutes. I used Mapbox to make these maps.

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Helpful Resources: