Local Traceroute: Home made Breadcrumbs.

Tracing routes from a website, is fine for some troubleshooting applications, however if you want to test your own connection, and not performance from random users, the only way to go is with local traceroute software.

I used the traceroute application installed with OSX, via the terminal to check the number of hops. Interestingly, im using a 3 mobile wireless dongle for my connection. Perhaps because it utlilises the mobile phone network, many of the first hops were hidden, or blocked my ping attempt.

However, it must be connected to the backbone at some point, and it appears from the trace that that point isnt very far from the curtin server!

traceroute: Warning: curtin.edu.au has multiple addresses; using 134.7.179.53
traceroute to curtin.edu.au (134.7.179.53), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 * * *
2 * * *
3 * * *
4 10.188.84.42 (10.188.84.42) 339.976 ms 378.725 ms 360.787 ms
5 134.7.179.53 (134.7.179.53) 300.064 ms 339.318 ms 309.119 ms


a whois search on 134.7.179.53 returns curtin university details.

a whois search on 10.188.84.42 returns:

OrgName: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
OrgID: IANA
Address: 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
City: Marina del Rey
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 90292-6695
Country: US

NetRange: 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255
CIDR: 10.0.0.0/8
NetName: RESERVED-10
NetHandle: NET-10-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType: IANA Special Use
NameServer: BLACKHOLE-1.IANA.ORG
NameServer: BLACKHOLE-2.IANA.ORG
Comment: This block is reserved for special purposes.
Comment: Please see RFC 1918 for additional information:
Comment: http://www.arin.net/reference/rfc/rfc1918.txt
RegDate:
Updated: 2007-11-27

the "blackhole" servers are setup to respond to whois requests from, in this case, internal networks.

So, in this case, the route to the curtin servers goes from the wireless dongle through some secret parts of the internet, through an internal network (either at the isp, or at curtin) straight to the curtin site.

Much faster, and in this case, probably a result of the early associations of the internet with universities.