A Group Effort

roundcrisis

I agree with the charity work and all
what kept me from replying is that I dont know if I am capable of doing such a project in php altough i think It would be really useful, another thing that would be really useful is a FREE geographical ip tracker
r.

ps: the lan project as a standalone application is (for me) easier to do but it would be limited to one OS plataform to run the program in. an that s a limitation from the start.

mneylon

roundcrisis wrote:

another thing that would be really useful is a FREE geographical ip tracker

Depending on what you want to do this could be interesting.
A lot of the data is freely available, but if you want the most up to date data you do need to pay for it.

dangerman

on the LAN idea:

I think a web interface would be best if it's at all possible, with a java backend powering it. But as with yourself Lolth, my programming ability is well below the reqs for this kind of thing. - I'd definately enjoy doing all the little icons though.

What's an ip tracker in this context?

For example, do you mean a variant on this: http://paulding.net/IPcheck.html

roundcrisis

well i reckon we could go with the free stuff first
and then see we can pay for the rest . what d you think?

roundcrisis

an Iptracker or tracer show you the information of all the routers from where you are up to an specifi ip address, try in your command prompt tracert htmail.com and youll see what i mean,
The geographical version will actually how you in a map where are these router located
For tons of people on the web this information is very interesting for example if you have a eComerce website or if you recieved a strange email and you want to check the source of it.

roundcrisis

on the lan idea i think it would be better if you have a web interface definetly but I don t think i can do that at this stage, i could, however once the data is in a db or somewhere output it in a map and show the trace, can you do the other part blacknight?

mneylon

roundcrisis wrote:

however once the data is in a db or somewhere output it in a map and show the trace, can you do the other part blacknight?

I'm not much of a programmer

Contact me directly to discuss what needs doing etc...

dangerman

just stumbled across a link to another ip thing:

http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation

The graphical trace route is a nice idea. How would the map graphic be created from the trace-route info?

mneylon

dangerman wrote:

just stumbled across a link to another ip thing:

http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation

The graphical trace route is a nice idea. How would the map graphic be created from the trace-route info?

If you can map the IP address of a hop to a geographical point .....

Have a Google for "visual traceroute"

roundcrisis

basically IF you get this info then you can have worldmap with diferent refernce points, countries and cities, and using the locations of the routers you simply draw from one point to the other
something similar to this, but avoiding the hasle of loging in or downloading and installing something that might be spyware etc:

http://www.spychecker.com/screenshots/vroute.htm

dangerman

Ah ok. That sounds really nice. So just to get it clear in my head:

1. User visits site, presented with a form, fills in an IP/domain name and clicks on submit.

2. A trace route is performed server side from the users ip to the inserted ip.

3. A graphic is generated from the data showing the various hops.

Roundcrisis - how do you generate the graphic? My first experience with dynamically generating graphics is my sig below, just took data from the RSS feed to my site and used php to 'write' the png graphic with the headlines.

Would it be php? Or java etc.?

And the backend code to run the traceroute. - if the site was at all popular wouldn't that need quite a bit of resources?

roundcrisis

dangerman:
1, 2 and 3 well thats what i had in mind too.

replying your question: I reckon php, I have generated some dinamic images but i never tryed this kind of thing before, let me work on it a bit. Maybe we could offer to versions, with and without graphics so that if a visitor is on the site and its getting very slow, then we switch to the text only version wich will display the same informaiton (like router name, location, ip, i think)

and yes the resources could be a burden,

roundcrisis

By the way thanks to the mod of this forum for making this thread a sticky

r.

Webmonkey

Hey Guys, this sounds interesting. Id like to help out with this. How are you going to organise all this now. Should there be a dedicated website showing status of the development of the project. Maybe you should start building a team.

hostyle

Come up with a decent idea that hasnt been done more than five times already and I'll do the programming for you.

Ph3n0m

I do have to ask - what benefit does this proposed project have, apart from "showing off".

This type of thing has been done before, in fact most development ideas are simply re-hashes of whats already out there.

Initially this was going to be a "Open Source software project" and now in the last page or so, it appears to have been reduced to a project where a few technical people would benefit from developing the suggested idea - pardon me, but that is kinda pointless.

I am not blasting the idea of a group project but perhaps people need to go back to the drawing board and think of a practical product/project that would not just benefit those involved, but maybe have applications on a much wider scale (i.e. commercially)

just my €0.02