Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 22254
RFE: replace traceroute with the RIPE ('nikhef') traceroute
Last modified: 2015-03-04 20:08:44 EST
The traceroute tool distributed by RIPE (also very well known as the 'nikhef' traceroute) has many advanced features over the traceroute included with Red Hat. It even features AS lookups. RPMs are available: http://www.entire-systems.com/~droesen/ripe-traceroute-991603-1.src.rpm http://www.entire-systems.com/~droesen/ripe-traceroute-991603-1.i386.rpm
Traceroute is setuid root. Current version is more widely used, and I dare say, better audited. The privileges are dropped earlier. It also seems that nikhef traceroute isn't being too actively maintained. I'm not sure if the switch is needed. However, I'm all in for merging some features if someone cares enough to do the job. It seems that there are following new (at least marginally useful) options in there: -A Look up the AS-number (Autonomous System) for each hop's network address at the whois server specified by the -h option. -a If the destination host has multiple addresses, traceroute will probe all addresses if this option is set. Normally only the first address as returned by the resolver is attempted. -h server Specify the name or IP address of the whois server that will be contacted for the AS-number lookup, if the -A option is given. -k Keep the connection to the whois server permanently open. This will speedup lookups considerably, since otherwise a connection needs to be set up for each individual lookup. Unfortunately, not all whois servers support this feature. -l Print the value of the ttl field in each received packet (this can be used to help detect asymmetric routing). -Q maxquit Stop probing this hop after maxquit consecutive timeouts are detected. The default value is 5. Use- ful in combination with -S if you have specified a big nqueries probe count. -S Print a per-hop min/avg/max rtt statistics summary. This suppresses the per-probe rtt and ttl reporting. For better statistics you need to increase the default nqueries probe count. See also -Q. AS related settings are neat but only useful for those that even know what they are (<5%) or are acquainted with them (<1%). :-) This leaves -a, -l, -Q, -S. -Q looks very interesting, -l might also be rather useful.
New URL: http://www.swat.bofh.de/RPMS/7.1/ripe-traceroute-991603-2.src.rpm
I think we'll stay with the current version for the mentioned reasons. Read ya, Phil