astraceroute(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | USAGE EXAMPLE | NOTE | BUGS | LEGAL | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON | COLOPHON

ASTRACEROUTE(8)            netsniff-ng toolkit           ASTRACEROUTE(8)

NAME         top

       astraceroute - autonomous system trace route utility

SYNOPSIS         top

       astraceroute [options]

DESCRIPTION         top

       astraceroute is a small utility to retrieve path information in a
       traceroute like way, but with additional geographical location
       information. It tracks the route of a packet from the local host
       to the remote host by successively increasing the IP's TTL field,
       starting from 1, in the hope that each intermediate node will
       send an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED notification back to the local host
       when the TTL value is decremented to 0.

       astraceroute supports IPv4 and IPv6 queries and will display
       country and city information, if available, the AS number the hop
       belongs to, and its ISP name. astraceroute also displays timing
       information and reverse DNS data.

       Due to astraceroute's configurability, it is also possible to
       gather some more useful information about the hop regarding what
       it does and does not allow to pass through. This is done by using
       clear text strings for probing DPIs or ``great firewalls'' to
       determine if they will filter out blocked critical keywords. This
       tool might be a good start for further in-depth analysis of such
       systems.

OPTIONS         top

       -H <host>, --host <host>
              Hostname or IPv4 or IPv6 address of the remote host where
              the AS route should be traced to. In the case of an IPv6
              address or host, option -6 must be used. IPv4 is the
              default.

       -p <port>, --port <port>
              TCP port for the remote host to use. If not specified, the
              default port used is 80.

       -i <device>, -d <device>, --dev <device>
              Networking device to start the trace route from, e.g.
              eth0, wlan0.

       -b <IP>, --bind <IP>
              IP address to bind to other than the network device's
              address. You must specify -6 for an IPv6 address.

       -f <ttl>, --init-ttl <ttl>
              Initial TTL value to be used. This option might be useful
              if you are not interested in the first n hops, but only
              the following ones. The default initial TTL value is 1.

       -m <ttl>, --max-ttl <ttl>
              Maximum TTL value to be used. If not otherwise specified,
              the maximum TTL value is 30. Thus, after this has been
              reached astraceroute exits.

       -q <num>, --num-probes <num>
              Specifies the number of queries to be done on a particular
              hop. The default is 2 query requests.

       -x <sec>, --timeout <sec>
              Tells astraceroute the probe response timeout in seconds,
              in other words the maximum time astraceroute must wait for
              an ICMP response from the current hop. The default is 3
              seconds.

       -X <string>, --payload <string>
              Places an ASCII cleartext string into the packet payload.
              Cleartext that contains whitespace must be put into quotes
              (e.g.: "censor me").

       -l <len>, --totlen <len>
              Specifies the total length of the packet. Payload that
              does not have a cleartext string in it is padded with
              random garbage.

       -4, --ipv4
              Use IPv4 only requests. This is the default.

       -6, --ipv6
              Use IPv6 only requests. This must be used when passing an
              IPv6 host as an argument.

       -n, --numeric
              Tells astraceroute to not perform reverse DNS lookup for
              hop replies. The reverse option is -N.

       -u, --update
              The built-in geo-database update mechanism will be invoked
              to get Maxmind's latest version. To configure search
              locations for databases, the file /etc/netsniff-
              ng/geoip.conf contains possible addresses. Thus, to save
              bandwidth or for mirroring Maxmind's databases (to bypass
              their traffic limit policy), different hosts or IP
              addresses can be placed into geoip.conf, separated by a
              newline.

       -L, --latitude
              Also show latitude and longitude of hops.

       -N, --dns
              Tells astraceroute to perform reverse DNS lookup for hop
              replies. The reverse option is -n.

       -S, --syn
              Use TCP's SYN flag for the request.

       -A, --ack
              Use TCP's ACK flag for the request.

       -F, --fin
              Use TCP's FIN flag for the request.

       -P, --psh
              Use TCP's PSH flag for the request.

       -U, --urg
              Use TCP's URG flag for the request.

       -R, --rst
              Use TCP's RST flag for the request.

       -E, --ecn-syn
              Use TCP's ECN flag for the request.

       -t <tos>, --tos <tos>
              Explicitly specify IP's TOS.

       -G, --nofrag
              Set IP's no fragmentation flag.

       -Z, --show-packet
              Show and dissect the returned packet.

       -v, --version
              Show version information and exit.

       -h, --help
              Show user help and exit.

USAGE EXAMPLE         top

       astraceroute -i eth0 -N -S -H netsniff-ng.org
              This sends out a TCP SYN probe via the ''eth0'' networking
              device to the remote IPv4 host netsniff-ng.org. This
              request is most likely to pass. Also, tell astraceroute to
              perform reverse DNS lookups for each hop.

       astraceroute -6 -i eth0 -S -E -N -H www.6bone.net
              In this example, a TCP SYN/ECN probe for the IPv6 host
              www.6bone.net is being performed. Also in this case, the
              ''eth0'' device is being used as well as a reverse DNS
              lookup for each hop.

       astraceroute -i eth0 -N -F -H netsniff-ng.org
              Here, we send out a TCP FIN probe to the remote host
              netsniff-ng.org. Again, on each hop a reverse DNS lookup
              is being done and the queries are transmitted from
              ''eth0''. IPv4 is used.

       astraceroute -i eth0 -N -FPU -H netsniff-ng.org
              As in most other examples, we perform a trace route to
              IPv4 host netsniff-ng.org and do a TCP Xmas probe this
              time.

       astraceroute -i eth0 -N -H netsniff-ng.org -X censor-me -Z
              In this example, we have a Null probe to the remote host
              netsniff-ng.org, port 80 (default) and this time, we
              append the cleartext string "censor-me" into the packet
              payload to test if a firewall or DPI will let this string
              pass. Such a trace could be done once without and once
              with a blocked string to gather possible information about
              censorship.

NOTE         top

       If a TCP-based probe fails after a number of retries,
       astraceroute will automatically fall back to ICMP-based probes to
       pass through firewalls and routers used in load balancing for
       example.

       To gather more information about astraceroute's displayed AS
       numbers, see e.g.: http://bgp.he.net/AS<number>.

BUGS         top

       The geographical locations are estimated with the help of
       Maxmind's GeoIP database and can differ from the real physical
       location. To decrease the possible errors, update the database
       regularly using astraceroute's --update option.

       At some point in time, we need a similar approach to gather more
       reliable path information such as in the paris-traceroute tool.

       Due to the generic nature of astraceroute, it currently has a
       built-in mechanism to stop the trace after a fixed number of
       hops, since the configurable TCP flags can have anything
       included. It is possible to decrease this number of course.  In
       the future, if a SYN probe is sent out, there should be a
       listener so that we can stop the trace if we detect a handshake
       in progress.

LEGAL         top

       astraceroute is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0.

HISTORY         top

       astraceroute was originally written for the netsniff-ng toolkit
       by Daniel Borkmann. It is currently maintained by Tobias Klauser
       <tklauser@distanz.ch> and Daniel Borkmann
       <dborkma@tik.ee.ethz.ch>.

SEE ALSO         top

       netsniff-ng(8), trafgen(8), mausezahn(8), ifpps(8), bpfc(8),
       flowtop(8), curvetun(8)

AUTHOR         top

       Manpage was written by Daniel Borkmann.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the Linux netsniff-ng toolkit project. A
       description of the project, and information about reporting bugs,
       can be found at http://netsniff-ng.org/.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the netsniff-ng (a free Linux networking
       toolkit) project.  Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨http://netsniff-ng.org/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this
       manual page, send it to netsniff-ng@googlegroups.com.  This page
       was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/netsniff-ng/netsniff-ng⟩ on 2024-06-14.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2023-02-01.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Linux                         03 March 2013              ASTRACEROUTE(8)

Pages that refer to this page: bpfc(8)curvetun(8)flowtop(8)ifpps(8)mausezahn(8)netsniff-ng(8)trafgen(8)