Re: Downloading Debian from European Sites

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

Sergio Brandano <serbr@libero.it> writes:

>  So, is xtraceroute broken?  If you have an explanation, let me know
>  about it.

Reading xtraceroute's homepage, one sees:

  5: How does it work?

  It gets all the site names from traceroute, and then it checks them
  out against a few small databases of names, IP-numbers, networks,
  and geographical coordinates. If it can't find them there, it tries
  to make a clever guess. Then it plots them on the globe.
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I think you're in the land of the not-so-clever guess, probably based
on the assumption that there is some relationship between the physical
location of www.uk.debian.org and the contact address for debian.org.

This is a fairly dim assumption, given that www.uk.debian.org is a
CNAME for open.hands.com, so they could have tracked down the contact
address for hands.com, which would have placed it in Reading, England
(still wrong, but much closer).

The problem is that xtraceroute is attempting to do the impossible,
and hence can be expected to get it horribly wrong on a regular basis
(although it could still be improved, so if you care, I suggest that
you report as a bug the fact that it didn't follow the CNAME before it
started making spurious guesses)

Cheers, Phil.