Wondering if you took a look at or took some inspiration from the packet structures for TWAMP/TWAMP-LITE/SDLM RFCs for round trip times/packet loss measurements or if you sort of winged it and came up with your own. I've been meaning to learn rust by implementing those protocols.
Copying the per-hop loss indicator from mtr is a bad decision in my opinion. It's always been a source of incorrect diagnosis of network issues. The only loss that matters is end to end.
You are right that showing packet loss for intermediate hops is a frequent source of confusion.
Rather than leave it out, I added a status column which shows different statuses for intermediate hops (blue if the hop responds to less than 100% of probes and brown if it responds to 0%) vs the target hop (which show amber and red respectively).
Where this breaks down is when dealing with ECMP for UDP & TCP tracing, as a given hop (ttl) may represent the target for a given round of tracing but not for the next. The mistake, imho, is to associate _any_ data with a hop (ttl) rather than the hop in the context of a tracing flow.
That is why Trippy had a number of features aimed at helping with ECMP, such as Paris and Dublin tracing, and the ability to filter tracing by unique flow id. I've covered these quite a bit in the 0.8.0 [0] and 0.9.0 [1] release notes if you want to know more.
It also mentions that isolated hops that show increased latency or loss are most likely throttling on the device. However, if that latency or loss persists on further hops, that indicates a problem.
Another issue with traceroutes is that is usually doesn't account for asymmetry in the return path. What I would find interesting to see is something like isoping/splitping (see this blog post https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ping-with-loss-latency-split), to account for that asymmetry.
Regarding the tool trippy itself: awesome visualizations!
This is a cool talk, thanks for posting it. One cute thing tools like `trippy` could do (from the talk) would be the reverse lookup on the peer /30 address for all the intermediate hops. I don't know if `trippy` does this (I've installed and played with it but not carefully), but you could also color-code latency spikes that persist into future hops.
I like to always say that traceroute gives you the approximate path a packet will take, whereas ping is for end to end measurement and loss. I'm personally not a big fan of combining the two tools.
That is not entirely true. Sure it’s not a 100% reliable signal as routing is asymmetric but it also often isn’t and also gives you an idea of which point to ask first at least.
If the packet loss starts at your wifi router, or your ISPs router. Or the next hop after you ISP. That all gives you a bit of an idea where the problem likely is. I solve problems like that all the time.
I was a network engineer for over a decade in hosting datacenter environments and would get false reports of packet loss to various destinations because people would use MTR and say they see loss on the path. If a packet takes the path A -> B -> C and pings to B have 50% loss but pings to C have 0% loss, then the path is perfectly fine.
The only way to reliably isolate packet loss to a hop on the path is to have a destination for testing where packets pass through that hop and is in its bailiwick which doesn't perform rate limiting or policing of ICMP traffic.
Something I intend to add to Trippy, but have not got around to it yet; is to codify the "If a packet takes the path A -> B -> C and pings to B have 50% loss but pings to C have 0% loss, then the path is perfectly fine" idea and use that to produce more meaningful headline status information to the user. How would you codify this?
It's probably tricky but if there's loss at D, maybe only then materialize the display of the loss backwards until there is no loss: C? B? A? It gets tricky though where maybe there is a small loss at D, but say that C and B have chronic loss because of throttling in the slow path responses.
If D has 1% loss and B and C have 50%, is it fair to say A=0, B=1%, C=1%, D=1%?
MTR display of loss is indeed confusing, but when weird things are going on it can be helpful just stare at it a while to see what's going on. Trippy looks fantastic, and I need to play with it, but there are cases where I just want to stare at the path loss for a while.
There's no way to influence the TTL on TTL timed-out responses, is there? That'd be pretty cool if there were some way to get the return path of the intermediaries to reply.
I would love for there to be a useful indicator to the user to say if loss or latency is an issue.
Being able to indicate cascading loss (e.g. path A->B->C->D) shows loss at B, C, and D, is worth bubbling up to the user to say there might be real issues. Also any indication of loss at D is also an issue. Trying to reconcile these scenarios with the UI matters, but I don't think there's an easy way. What I think is more important than UI that is sorely needed is documentation / users guide explaining how to read and understand these indicators. I know documentation is usually overlooked by users first trying out a program, but having it documented and explained can be used as a reference to point to a user that is misunderstanding the tool. I found that MTR didn't have this much needed documentation / reference that people would easily misunderstand the tool and it was a herculean effort to correct them.
I would also like to point out that a 0% loss indicator at the destination isn't reliable either if the packets are spaced out with enough slack. One of my goto when testing packet loss of a link I've brought up is to smash a destination host with a ping flood, e.g. ping -c 100 -f 1.1.1.1. By inundating the link it helps provide a clear indicator if there is loss somewhere on the path (usually the first mile or the last). Cloudflare speedtest now has a packet loss tester that floods 1000 packets, although I'm not sure if it does it over an unreliable transport or not.
I agree regarding documentation. There was a request [0] for something similar, though not specifically covering this important point.
Regarding sending a ping flood, Trippy allow you to reduce the minimum and maximum round time (and grace period) to send packets almost as fast as you like. For example, to send at 50ms intervals (with a 10ms grace period):
> how did you accomplish all the package managers?
In most cases I didn't do anything! I've discovered that there are many kind souls out there who are willing to give up their free time to package and maintain 3rd party applications for a variety of systems they wish to support. It's tedious and, I suspect, usually thankless work. I am very grateful to all of those who have helped with this for Trippy.
As a network engineer, it's a neat tool, I installed it on arch, and had the mmdb to point at for geo, so that was cool, but mostly unrealistic. My customer in nyc from phoenix says goes via switzerland, but at least I know better. I sent out to my current customers slack channel to check out, it's at least prettier than mtr.
Yes, in my experience GeoIp is _highly_ unreliable, alas Trippy can do no more than report the location from the provided mmdb file.
I'm aware of some interesting techniques which use timing measurements from multiple locations to try and triangulate a more accurate location. In fact somebody raised a request for supporting JA4L [0] to me just this morning.
Free geoip database is very so-so, at least for residential addresses. For example, my ISP is of Romanian ownership (Digi), and although I'm Spanish, located in Spain, and using a Spanish contract (not roaming at all) for years (not a recently arrived ISP), I'm still very frequently shown Romanian versions of ecommerce sites I visit from my phone or home connection.
But I wonder: shouldn't at least intermediate router/exchanges locations be better pinpointed through their who is information? Isn't that database updated?
I wonder how reliable is JA4L once you start adding hops in the middle of the trace, I guess it takes in account the timing of the intermediate points.
A little time ago (1 month? 2? I'm so bad with dates) somebody showed their IP location service that was built using a similar technique, but measuring from multiple different locations, and I think they had a free version of the database. I'll try to find it later.
I think I might've mixed a bunch of different stuff in my comment, but the provider I was talking about was IPInfo. They do distributed JA4L-like location guessing and have a free IP-to-country DB:
That looks great, seems like they've raised the bar for GeoIp accuracy, kudos to them.
It looks like they provide mmdb files (for a fee) which should be compatible with Trippy. I'd love to be able to test it out, the sample [0] they provide is rather limited but I guess enough to test compatibility.
What a coincidence! I am the DevRel of IPinfo, and I was just about to reach out to you. My teammate (Shoutout to Max) has already mentioned your project on our team Slack, and I was thinking about a polite way to pitch our free IPinfo Country ASN dataset to your project. I will open a Github Issue right now.
You might also be interested in "geofeed" attributes in the WHOIS databases, in some database they can be found in a "remarks" field).
This record usually leads to an RFC 8805 formatted document that shows a mapping between IP address ranges and their (approximate) location. In RFC 9092, efforts were made to make this a more structural field.
The TUI is built with the awesome Ratatui [0] library (formerly tui-rs [1]). UX is certainly not my area of expertise and I would not have been able to create Trippy without this library.
Trippy is a modern, cross platform, feature rich alternative to MTR with a fancy TUI. And yes, it’s written in Rust.
https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy