A tool to find the site with fewest hops?

["Joe Emenaker" <jemenake@genesiscom.com>]

I have this dilemma every time I configure a new Debian box and am setting
up which mirror to point dselect and apt to.

I want to find the sites that have fewer hops and lower ping times than the
rest.... so that I can use the sites that are "closer" (not geographically,
but as far as net traffic goes) and do my part to keep backbone traffic
down.

I'm wondering if there's a tool out there that can take a list of hostnames
and give me some output showing number of hops and ping times.

I've already written a rudimentary one in perl (if anyone's interested), but
I figure someone else has surely written a better one already....

Well?

- Joe