One of the nice features of the ring is the ability to view routing information from a large (and growing!) number of sources all around te world. We can combine this information to create cool things, like graphs which show the similarities and differences in traceroutes towards a common destination. This is exactly what ring-trace does. More detailed information on how to use ring-trace can be found on the Toolbox page.

Here are a few examples of graphs generated by ring-trace which show some interesting things:

The traces towards www.apple.com show indications on how Apple implemented global loadbalancing. The trace towards www.telstra.net is a nice example of a host “far away”, which gives us some indications of the transit providers used by various networks. The traces towards www.arin.net show a somewhat similar picture. The www.ripe.net show some IPv6 traces with ‘broken’ hops in it.

ring-trace can be downloaded here. It requires graphviz and python-dnspython packages on Ubuntu. Bug reports, fixes and suggestions for additional code are welcome of course, as well as graphs of the most awesome traces around the world.