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Noah Campbell
Asked: 2009-06-12 11:24:08 +0800 CST

When using traceroute -A, where does the ASN come from?

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I haven't cracked open the source code yet, but I was curious which whois service the traceroute program uses to look up ASNs for a given IP.

domain-name-system networking command-line-interface bgp

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The copy running on my Linux box gets its answers from 198.108.0.18. I was able to tell this by running tcpdump at the same time as running a traceroute.

    The PTR records for that IP resolve to rpsl-p.merit.edu, and it happens that whois.radb.net. and whois.ra.net. point to the same IP address.

    Further examination of the binary (with "strings") reveals that it's actually using the whois.radb.net hostname. There's also a pair of (undocumented) environment variables ($RA_SERVER and $RA_SERVICE) which can change the host and port used for these queries.

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  2. Having not looked at the source code, I would suspect either whois.ra.net or riswhois.ripe.net or equivalent.

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