Neotrace - I know where you live !

What could be nicer than a tool that relates the virtual world to the real world... does this effectively... and actually provides useful information !

Enter Neotrace.

A lot of you might have heard of it.. its like a 'visual' traceroute.. it displays a map of the world and the actual geographical location of the ip you're tracing.. as well as the geographical locations of all the hops on the way !!

It doesn't stop there.. it also runs a whois query for you, and gives you all the usual whois info.. who registered the ip, their address, what netblock they registered etc etc. It also gives you the usual time statistics, how long each packet took etc etc.

We go on further ! It supports a series of other commands, including
View a satellite image of the location
Check uptime and OS (webserver only)
Telnet to host
FTP to host

other than the map view it can show you the data in graph format, or a nice node list. I'm uploading screens for all you tech junkies.

Screen 1 - The map view.. showing my location (Bombay) and the trace to www.google.com (in Sunnyvale). If you're wondering why my machine looks so much cooler than yours, I'm using StyleXP with the ChaNinja theme :)



Screen 2 - The list view - you can see the time taken on the graph. I've censored the first three IP addresses thats why they aren't showing up. Oh yeah I'm also listening to Van Halen in winamp (look at the title bar) and yes I own the CD.



Screen 3 - The node view - once again I've censored the first few IP addresses. I've got firewall.cx open in the taskbar where I'm typing this post and the little red arrows near my clock are DUmeter, another very neat tool.




People have told me that this isn't a serious tool.. I disagree.. even if you don't give a hoot about the map, this is a tool that can traceroute, dump whois data, graph response times and let you check uptime, telnet, ftp etc. All in one nice package.

So now you're begging for the url aren't you ?
www.neoworx.com

Oh yeah did I mention it has different colour schemes seems like after the matrix anything with a Neo in it is cool.

Have fun,

The address neoworx.com has apparently changed or the dns servers are incorrect somewhere.

From google, the address was valid. Here is one of the results of my searches:

NeoWorx - Design Review. [zoom in screenshot - 93K]. NeoWorx www.neoworx.com
(design offline). Category: Internet. Created ...

From whois you get:

neoworx.com Back-order this name

Registrant:
Neoworx, inc (NEOWORX-DOM)
535 Oakmead Pkwy.
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
US

Domain Name: NEOWORX.COM

As you cannot get this name, it must still be in use.

Not sure why it is going to Macafee, unless there is some changes going on with the webservers and for some reason Macafee now has the address that neoworx is set up with.

You can get the program at various places. Tucows has it at: www.tucows.com/preview/194046.html

While I've been a VisualRoute user for the past 4 years, Sahir's post has convinced me in less than 25 seconds that times have changed and I should upgrade to the cool Neo Trace.

I've heard alot of people calling such programs "rubbish" but I honestly think they have no idea what they are talking about, or they have a serious attitude problem.

I find myself using these programs many times during the day, and thanks to their built-in DNS resolution and whois features, they have become any network admin's best friend.

I'm sure this program would be a valid candidate for the downloads section!

Chris, I used to use visualroute a long time ago but then got annoyed when it used to require IE to work (I don't know if it still does) and I was still making a last stand for netscape (Communicator 4.5 I believe it was). Needless to say, we lost the war.. I'm an IE user now.. but Neotrace was my alternative to visualroute, and I still find it better !

Tom, nice of you to find holes in my post Deathmatrix also pointed it out. The link is not wrong.. Mcafee swallowed up neoworx, and then used the technology in their (absolutely pathetic) personal firewall. Its one of those firewalls that will scream "You're being hacked !! Click here to see the geographic location of the hacker !!" and when you do that, you use the neotrace engine to display a pretty map. Sigh.. anyway heres an updated link, if something changes in the matrix don't blame me.. just google for a new link !
home.pages.at/jooman/download/neotrace.php

Speaking of the Matrix, I went and watched Revolutions yesterday and came back with mixed impressions (I wasn't expecting a spectacular story) but the fight sequence at Xion and the end fight sequences were worth the money. Pity they made the love angle drag on. Its still way better than Reloaded though ! So now my desktop picks up a Matrix theme just for a bit hehe. If you wanna give your command prompt a little matrix-ish spin, then do this :

Click the icon near where it says 'Command Prompt' in the title bar.
Select 'Properties'
Choose the 'Colors' tab
Make Screen Background black
Change Screen text to the following values :
Red : 0
Green : 255
Blue : 124

Save the settings.
Nice part is that when you press alt+enter and fullscreen the window the text is still easy to read. I wonder if I'm the only person who still works in full screen command prompts ?

And yes this is a post with colour !

Actually I'm planning to go see the new Matrix movie this week - If I manage to find some time for it!

I read the impressions on the movie from imbd.com and it seems like most people were quite disappointed with the story plot;

I haven't read anything else (other than Sahir's post) on what happens in the movie so I don't walk in the cinema disappointed!

However, I'll give the matrix colours a try


Note: Thankfully I still haven't moved away from the good old full screen command prompts! I still drop into dos to delete them ugly directories with 1 million files in them and its STILL much faster compared to the Windows GUI!

I am a strong believer of DOS and I always like to say ..... DOS Rocks! :lol:

Yknow in XP they kicked out deltree ! I can't believe it...
However thanks to having cygwin installed I use the linux command
rm -rf <directory>
and its nuked

I'm waiting for Longhorn to come out with its jazzed up command line interface and scripting. I am a DOS believer as well.. its in my quick launch and has a ctrl+shift+x shortcut key.