Visualware's VisualRoute 8.0a

Knowing the locations of IP addresses that access your Web servers, send you e-mail or try to steal your company's confidential data can be helpful. Tracking a hacker's address to a location across town - and not North Korea - suggests which law enforcement agency to notify.

Visualware says its VisualRoute software graphically displays traceroute network path information, including destination and intermediate hop locations on a zoomable world map that tells you precisely where and how traffic is flowing between two Internet nodes. The company says its highly visual network path analysis can help network managers more easily and productively troubleshoot network connectivity problems.

VisualRoute 8.0a (the company recently released Version 8.0b) showed that the software is better than a typical command-line traceroute utility. VisualRoute graphs hop-to-hop time intervals to help identify network bottlenecks, and its Internet Control Messaging Protocol-based network path information is accurate and runs on several platforms. However, its location information was often incorrect or missing, the user interface was sluggish, its error messages were cryptic, and it has some glaring bugs. We also wished VisualRoute could integrate with our Web servers to show where site visitors were located instead of having us enter each URL or address one at a time (see "How we did it").

Tracing our steps

VisualRoute is Java-based software that installs on Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux platforms. The install process put some Win32 Dynamic Link Libraries on our hard drive and inserted several entries in our Windows registry, implying that VisualRoute's architecture, despite its "write once, run anywhere" Java underpinnings, relies to some extent on operating system-specific helper software and might run differently on a non-Windows machine. For more intensive diagnosis of network ills, VisualRoute can look for other open ports besides Port 80 (HTTP). It told us, for example, whether POP3, FTP, SMTP or DNS services were running on a particular server. It also includes E-mail Tracker, Ping Grapher and VisualRoute Server features.

VisualRoute's traceroute data accurately and graphically depicted the routers, switches and other pingable connection points between our source node and any remote site we specified. While tracing a path, the tool dynamically listed the hops' identities and response times, showed a percent completed progress indicator and displayed messages such as "Analysis: VisualRoute can connect to 'ftp.microsoft.com', but had problems tracing the route. It is an FTP server." VisualRoute's graph of response times and informative analysis messages make it a better route tracer than the ubiquitous command-line utility.

VisualRoute's location data was correct slightly more than 75% of the time for domestic sites, and about 50% correct for overseas sites. For example, it correctly noted that www.times.kg (The Times of Central Asia newspaper) is in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. However, it didn't know that the axr00msy-7-0-0-1.bellsouth.net router is in Mississippi. In one case, the program got confused over the location of www.ahram.org.eg (a government-controlled Egyptian newspaper in Egypt). VisualRoute traced it to Egypt and beyond - to the Netherlands. It's actually in Egypt, but the ISP appears to have offices in the Netherlands (see graphic, below). We'd prefer that VisualRoute draw a question mark instead of an endpoint when it finds the destination location information is missing or doesn't correspond exactly to the destination IP address.