Sometimes, quick and dirty tools give you results that are good enough for your purposes that you can do without elaborate and expensive software – especially when the tools in question are free. Netmap lets you create a map of all the routers that connect you to the Internet using Graphviz, and shows the hops between them. “It doesn’t do anything very useful or mission-critical but it allows the curious the play around a bit. It’s a fun project,” says creator Wouter Godefroy, a Belgian network and security freelancer.
Godefroy created Netmap eight years ago, shortly after he quit his job as a C++ programmer for a company that made a C compiler and hardware generator. “I wanted to consolidate my C++ knowledge in a project and give something back to the open source community, so I created Netmap.”
Godefroy placed the software on SourceForge.net late in 2001, and there it stayed, unrevised, until last week. “I stopped using C++ and started to using scripting languages,” he says, “and I lost interest in the project. Recently I returned to my first love (C++) to start coding a new project (conchart). While I was back into C++ it only took a little effort to fix the things in Netmap that stopped it from compiling.”
This may be the last revision for Netmap, Godefroy says. “My main focus will be to develop conchart, not Netmap. I just pushed it so it compiles again. There are quite a few things in Netmap that bother me, including the fact that it calls the traceroute program using system, and the absolute lack of autoconf features to make it portable.”
If anyone wants to help Godefroy solve those issues, they can get in touch via SourceForge.net email.