A multiaddress traceroute

[theobat]

Following ipfs-inactive/faq#205
It seems no one has either had the idea or -more probably- had the time to implement a traceroute command that would print geophysical informations given a multiaddress. If anyone has tried even minimally to do such thing please answer this post.

I might consider doing this on my own if nothing has been tried and if I can find some time... please let me know if anyone else is interested

Gathering info

• https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aipfs+TTL&type=Issues (TTL in ipfs)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_live (TTL in IP)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop_(networking)

Tools to be considered:

• https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-geoip

Much needed inspiration

• https://dublin-traceroute.net/README.md / https://github.com/insomniacslk/dublin-traceroute (c++, interesting schema)
• https://github.com/ayeowch/traceroute (python, seemingly poor geographical detection)

[jbenet]

I would love this

[jbenet]

A proper traceroute with multiaddr would just be similar to the normal traceroute-- but could print more information (like, something to do per part of the address)

It may be good here to figure out what this tool would be expected to do, so we align perspectives.

[theobat]

Well extracted from traceroute's man:

traceroute tracks the route packets taken from an IP network on their
way to a given host. It utilizes the IP protocol's time to live (TTL)
field and attempts to elicit an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED response from each
gateway along the path to the host.

I'm not sure there is such thing as a TTL for any multiaddress host, is there ? (I'll try to dive into this). The IP resolution would be just a wrapper around genuine traceroute command in my opinion. The real question is, how do we trace a pure ipfs address host, but that's what is truly interesting...