WhatRoute 1.4.3

What does WhatRoute Do?

Trace Internet Paths
The program is designed to find the names of all the routers through which an IP packet passes on the way from your Macintosh to the destination host. In addition it measures the round-trip time from your Macintosh to the router thus enabling you to determine slow links (hops) in the Internet. It can also find dead links - ie routers that don't respond etc etc. If you have access to a UNIX machine you should read the man page that accompanies 'traceroute'.

PING Remote Hosts
WhatRoute will PING remote hosts. In this function a small packet is sent to a remote host and then the time taken for a reply to be received is recorded.

DNS Query
The DNS Query function is borrowed from the BIND software. The results of DNS Query show all the DNS Resource Records associated with an Internet host or domain. The explanation of this stuff is the beyond the scope of this document and for further information, I recommend the O'Reilly book, DNS and BIND.

Popup menus give you the choice of Query Class and Query Type. The different record types are discussed in detail in DNS and BIND

You can also query alternate servers to those specified in your TCP/IP control panel. This uses the BIND 4.9.5 resolver and is seperately configured in the DNS Options dialog. The setup is identical to that required on a UNIX system but is also very similar to the configuration in your Open Transport TCP/IP control panel.

DNS Query is the only function in WhatRoute that uses the BIND resolver. All other functions use the settings from your TCP/IP control panel.

Finger
WhatRoute includes a Finger client. This enables you to find information about users logged in to other hosts, providing that host is running a Finger server. A lot of system administrators consider this to be a security risk, so you may not find this command to be particularly useful.

To use the command, type user@host.somedomain.com in the text entry field.
To find all users on a host, type @host.somedomain.com in the text field.

Whois
This command enables you to find out about people, networks etc who are registered in the InterNic database.
The default server is rs.internic.net

To get a full list of instructions, clear the text entry field and click the Whois button. This will list the Help file from the Whois server running on rs.internic.net

If you wish to use an alternate server, type @host.somedomain.com after the Whois command

TELNET Server
WhatRoute can be configured as a TELNET server. This enables you to log into your Macintosh from a remote machine and execute traceroute, ping and dnsquery commands.