ca-traceroute

A fabric script to gather traceroute information from our network of capture agents.

Setup

• Python 3.x
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• DCE_Epiphan private key loaded into your ssh agent via ssh-add [path to key file]

Run fab -l to confirm installation and view the list of fabric tasks.

Generate the capture agent hosts list

1. visit https://catracker.dcex.harvard.edu/ in your browser
2. Right-click, view the html source, and save as "Webpage, HTML Only" to a file, e.g. catracker.html
3. Run fab generate-host-list catracker.html

You should now have a hosts.json file in the project directory. cat the file to confirm it contains a list of the capture agent hostnames.

Run the traceroutes

The traceroute task will cycle through the list of capture agent hosts and execute a remote traceroute command on each host, capturing the output in a collection of .txt files in a local output directory. The task command is:

fab traceroutes --destination [admin host]

The [admin host] value can be a hostname or ip address. If it's a hostname the traceroute process will also involve dns resolution at each step, so probably best to use the IP address (?).

The task takes an optional --runs argument for specifying the number of traceroute commands results to collect. The default is 3 runs per host.

You can also specify a --port value, e.g. --port 8080 but I think this would only be useful in trying to determine if a particular port was blocked somewhere along the route.

Note: The process takes quite a long time, e.g. my initial run took ~5 hours.

Cleanup

The traceroute task appends the output to the files in output. Run fab clean between runs to wipe the existing output and start clean.