Okay, traceroute tells you the path that the data reaches its destination, but how can you find out what route the data returns to you, or a rough idea.

It seems some companies use superior bandwidth for incoming data and manipulate the routes to send outgoing data via lower quality providers. How can one tell?

Just run a trace route to your home PC from your server.

Can be done easily from the shell, or a cgi/php/asp script.

Regards

Matt

>asp??? not easy from ASP page without a COM object unless you're using ASP.NET.

Yeah I realise that. I can do that no problem. :)

What about a server that I do not have an account on?

Eg. Say I want to find out more about xyzhost, the traceroute says UUNET, they advertise UUNET, and all incoming data is coming in via UUNET, however since out-going data is generally much more than incoming they send the outgoing data via Cogent. How am I to know before signing up?

Urm... good point!

You could lookup the email addresses of some of the people they host and ask them.

Other than that I can't think of anything at the moment!

Regards

Matt

There is no way. The only way would be to make some cgi script or such. If your not on their network already or don't have hosting the best way is to request them to run a traceroute. If they want you as a customer they will. That is the only way I could figure. The reason there is no way to reverse a traceroute is since it uses udp packets to do the traceroute i think

actually looking around i found this. I have no clue if it works or not but they give you a 30 day trial

http://www.traceloop.com/traceloop/home/index.jsp

Originally posted by zupanm
The reason there is no way to reverse a traceroute is since it uses udp packets to do the traceroute i think

Actually traceroutes are a strange beast, they generally use a combination of TCP and UDP packets:

http://cities.lk.net/trproto.html