Geotrace

Geotrace is a cool geographical traceroute tool that gives you a nice graphical view right on the map. It comes with tons of geographical maps for you to explore. If you're looking to use a new map with Geotrace, there’s just one key thing to keep in mind: you need the longitude and latitude for the top left and bottom right corners of your map.

Finding Your Map

Most maps you find online are centered around 0,0, which is about 5 degrees south of Ghana and 10 degrees west of Gabon (just in case you were wondering, that's in Africa!). Here’s how to get started:

1. First off, you need to find a map. There are loads available online! NASA has some, but fair warning—it can be a bit messy over there. You might also want to check out websites that have maps for XGlobe and XPlanet.


2. Your image should be in a format that Geotrace understands, like JPEG or GIF—most images you'll find will be just fine.


3. Next, go into the maps/ directory within Geotrace. Place your new map there and open up maps.properties.


4. You’ll see a line that says MAPS:World50.gif, World100.gif, etc. This lists all the maps currently available. Just add the name of your new map on this line.


5. Now we need to tell Geotrace what the coordinates are! Add this line: filename:BOUNDARY=lon1,lat1,lon2,lat2. Remember:




• filename: This is case sensitive; make sure your map is in the maps/ folder.


• lon1 and lat1: These are for the top left corner.


• lon2 and lat2: These are for the bottom right corner.





If you're using most found maps, you'll probably see coordinates like -180,90,180,-90 because they center around 0,0. But if you're working with the two world maps (World100 and World50) from Geotrace, those center around 10W,0.





Selecting Your Map




You might notice that three US maps have an extra line linked to them—that's related to something called the Alber projection. Don’t worry if it sounds complicated; you likely won't have to deal with it!




The final step? Run Geotrace! Select your newly added map from the drop-down menu and enjoy exploring!





Limitations & Updates




Limitations:




If some hops show strange locations—well—that's not on me! The netgeo server hasn’t fully updated its records yet. My advice? Just roll with it!




What's New In This Release:





• Additions like line color and width options.


• You can now use command-line arguments for host tracing and startup maps!


• Status bar added along with warnings about checking paths when running it for the first time.


• A bunch of bug fixes including issues where traces wouldn’t draw or crashes during hop timeouts!


• You can even choose whether or not