XTRACEROUTE(1)						      General Commands Manual						    XTRACEROUTE(1)

NAME

       xtraceroute - graphical (X11) traceroute

SYNOPSIS

       xtraceroute [options] [hostname]

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page briefly documents the xtraceroute, command.  This manual page was originally written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution
       because the original program does not have a manual page.  Since then the author has gotten his act together and keeps it up to date.

       xtraceroute is a graphical version of the traceroute program, which traces the route your IP packets travel to their destination.

       On the display:

       * Green dots have good location information that came from LOC fields in the DNS, which is the best data out there.

       * Orange ones has been guessed from the sites' suffix.

       * Yellow ones got resolved via a database of city names and "known" routers.  That data is old and inaccurate  and  it's  not  getting  any
       younger.

       * Red ones are completely unknown.

       * You can select dots by clicking on them both on the globe and in the list.

       *  Pressing  and  holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse will rotate the globe. Using the middle mouse button will move it, and
       the right mouse button will zoom it (only vertical movement counts). You can generally get the view you want this way.

ARGUMENTS

       hostname is the name (or IP address) of the host you are interested in.

OPTIONS

       The program follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (`-').

       --version
	      Show version number

       -h, --help
	      Display a brief help text.

       -T, --texture texture-name
	      Use a custom texture (map). It can be any kind of file that gdk_pixbuf can load (which is most reasonable formats).  There are a few
	      really good textures on http://www.radcyberzine.com/xglobe/ (Meant for use with Xglobe, but they'll work fine here as well.)

       --LOD number
	      Set the level-of-detail for the sphere.  (The default is 3, 0-4 are realistic values.)

       --stdin, -
	      Makes the program read data from stdin instead of calling traceroute(8) (Mainly useful for debugging)

CAVEATS

       xtraceroute tries hard to guess the location of machines, but it is just software, it doesn't know everything, and it makes mistakes.

       The  yellow  dots has been guessed by looking at the top level domain (TLD) of the hostname. This works fairly well for most countries, but
       there's a few exceptions where some small countries (like Niue (.nu) and Tuvalu (.tv)) will let anyone register domains in their space  for
       a  fee.	I  don't care, If it says .nu and it hasn't got a LOC record, it'll get plotted in Niue.  Also, very few US sites actually use the
       .us TLD.

       If it finds a very high-latency link, it will assume it it a satellite hop and plot it accordingly. If you have some  other  kind  of  slow
       link, like PPP over something slow or a really busy router, it might show up as a satellite hop as well.

FILES

       /usr/share/xtraceroute/earth.png
	      Default texture for the earth.

       /usr/share/xtraceroute/site_hosts.cache
	      System-wide hosts file (optional)

       /usr/share/xtraceroute/site_networks.cache
	      System-wide networks file (optional)

       The two files above are filled in by hand, following the model of /usr/lib/xtraceroute *.cache files.

       $HOME/.xt/user_hosts.cache
	      Your personal hosts file

       $HOME/.xt/user_networks.cache
	      Your personal networks file

       $HOME/.xt/user_generic.cache
	      Your personal base of regular expressions

       These three personal files are typically filled in via the Database menu.

LOC data
       The  Correct Way to tell the geographical location of a host on the internet is to ask the DNS. The way to do that is described in RFC1876,
       which defines the LOC (for location) RR. It's not exactly widely used, but you see it every now and then. Hopefully this program  can  help
       change that.

       How to get LOC data for your site into the DNS:

       Ask  your  local sysadmin that maintain your nameserver to read the RFC.  It's a fairly easy read as RFCs go, but it might help if you find
       out the location of your site in advance using, say, a GPS or a site like http://www.mapblast.com. Sysadmins are busy people.

       When xtraceroute tries to resolve a hostname it will try the proper name first, and then higher domains. For example  if  our  hostname	is
       "apa.bepa.cepa.com", it will try that, "bepa.cepa.com" and "cepa.com".  (But not just "com")

       This  means that if you're a big site and it's hard to persuade the admins to add individual LOC entries for all machines, you can try get-
       ting them to add one or two for the whole domain.

SEE ALSO

       traceroute(8)

       More information on xtraceroute is in /usr/doc/xtraceroute.

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used  by  others).
       Xtraceroute was written by Bjorn Augustsson <d3august@dtek.chalmers.se>.

BUGS

       Please send bug reports to Bjorn Augustsson <d3august@dtek.chalmers.se>.

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