What’s Skitter?

by Frank Paynter on September 7, 2005

Looks like a dynamic tool….  now where can I find someone to teach me the ins and outs?

  • Measure Forward IP Paths
    skitter records each hop from a source to many destinations.
    by incrementing the "time to live" (TTL)
    of each IP packet header and recording replies from each
    router (or hop) leading to the destination host.

  • Measure Round Trip Time
    skitter collects round trip time (RTT) along with path (hop) data.
    skitter uses ICMP echo requests as probes to a list of IP destinations.

  • Track Persistent Routing Changes
    skitter data can provide indications of low-frequency persistent routing changes. 
    Correlations between RTT and time of day may reveal a change in either forward or
    reverse path routing.

  • Visualize Network Connectivity
    By probing the paths to many destinations IP addresses spread throughout the IPv4
    address space, skitter data can be used to visualize the directed graph from a source to
    much of the Internet.

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Brian 09.07.05 at 11:21

Damn you - another neat toy I want to play with. Sleep or poke at skitter .. oh the agony of descision!

Winston 09.08.05 at 6:11

New one on me. But being a tool and utility junkie I’ve just GOT to try it.

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>