[GNUnet-developers] DNS traceroute study [OT]

[Chris GauthierDickey]

Dear all,

[This is OT, having nothing to do with GNUnet.]

I would like your help for a study on Internet topologies and its  relation to 
DNS reliability.  The goal is to do a traceroute from each site to all 40900 
DNS start-of-authority (SOA) servers worldwide.   For this work, we  are 
trying to run traceroutes from as many different Internet sites as possible. 
Hence I would really appreciate it if you would be able to run a simple piece 
of code (described below) on one of your Linux/UNIX systems and send  me the 
output.  Running it on your home ISP as well as at work would also be 
valuable (however; running it on two different systems at the same 
organization would not be useful).

I have compiled a set of shell scripts that will run traceroute and collect 
the data in a format suitable for our analysis. The scripts only need 
permission to run traceroute (often available for normal users on most 
systems) and "awk".  The script will run for about a week (!) using only a 
few minutes of CPU time in total (running traceroute in parallel, even with 
only a tiny amount of parallelism on some test networks caused ISPs to drop 
packets changing the results). The script produces a data.tar.gz-file with 
the results (4 MB after compression, less than 20 before).  

While  some (clueless) administrators sometimes "mind" being traceroutes, the  
scripts should in no way pose a security risk for anyone and I am not aware  
of any competent administrator that would mind this particular experiment. The
amount of CPU and bandwidth used is also miniscule (it could easily be 
supported by an 80386 with an old phone modem at, say, 33 kbps).  

The 335 kb shell script archive can be found at
                  http://grothoff.org/christian/traceroute-sh.tar.gz
(extract with 'tar xvfz traceroute-sh.tar.gz', then run 
"./master.sh").

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Christian