Yesterday I was getting a lot of pages that loaded without CSS or whatever, showing up as white space with links galore all formatted incorrectly.
--Patrick
[Question] The internet... seriously, what the hell?
- Thread starter Gared
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--Patrick
Yeah, I was having issues with that as well. Especially on the WSDOT site while I was attempting to pay off a toll bill. I just figured they were a bunch of complete amateurs and botched their CSS.
Damn you Youtube- WHY DON'T YOU WORK FOR ME!
figmentPez
Staff member
IDGI
You know what would make this perfect? If the number resolved to "towel.blinkenlights.nl".
Mere words fail to describe how awesome that is.
figmentPez
Staff member
Oh, okay. I didn't get it because I didn't actually try it. Which seems rather overly paranoid in retrospect. Then again...
When a computer sends a packet on the internet, there is a field that tells how many times the packet can be forwarded before it expires. For instance, this might be set to 10, and after it hits 10 routers, the eleventh one would reject it and send a packet back saying it was rejected. This way you don't get a packet running in circles around the same set of routers forever, eventually it'll expire.
Trace Route uses this feature to find all the routers between your computer and a remote IP address. By sending a packet with zero in this field, the next router rejects it, and your computer gets a rejection packet back with that router's ip address. It then sends another packet with that field set to 1, so it goes through the first router, then gets rejected at the second router. It continues to do this, incrementing this field each time, receiving a rejection packet from every router in its path, until it finally hits the destination IP.
In this way, one can map all the routers between their computer and another computer on the internet.
When your computer gets an IP address back, it can query the DNS system (which is usually used to convert domain names, such as halforums.com, into IP addresses, such as 199.193.246.206) to turn the IP address of the router into a domain name.
So some bored router engineer created a series of routers which have DNS names such that if you try to trace the route to 216.81.59.173 then you will receive the opening text crawl of Star Wars IV.
On any internet connected computer open a terminal window (windows: click the windows start button, then type "cmd" and press enter) and use the command "tracert 216.81.59.173" to execute a trace route on that IP address. On OSX and many unix systems it's "traceroute" and linux often uses "tracepath". Some versions will prematurely end the crawl (after 30-60 hops, since anything longer on today's internet is usually an anomaly) so you'll need to add a few command line options to make it keep tracing until the very end:
tracert -w 3 -h 100 216.81.59.173
Trace Route uses this feature to find all the routers between your computer and a remote IP address. By sending a packet with zero in this field, the next router rejects it, and your computer gets a rejection packet back with that router's ip address. It then sends another packet with that field set to 1, so it goes through the first router, then gets rejected at the second router. It continues to do this, incrementing this field each time, receiving a rejection packet from every router in its path, until it finally hits the destination IP.
In this way, one can map all the routers between their computer and another computer on the internet.
When your computer gets an IP address back, it can query the DNS system (which is usually used to convert domain names, such as halforums.com, into IP addresses, such as 199.193.246.206) to turn the IP address of the router into a domain name.
So some bored router engineer created a series of routers which have DNS names such that if you try to trace the route to 216.81.59.173 then you will receive the opening text crawl of Star Wars IV.
On any internet connected computer open a terminal window (windows: click the windows start button, then type "cmd" and press enter) and use the command "tracert 216.81.59.173" to execute a trace route on that IP address. On OSX and many unix systems it's "traceroute" and linux often uses "tracepath". Some versions will prematurely end the crawl (after 30-60 hops, since anything longer on today's internet is usually an anomaly) so you'll need to add a few command line options to make it keep tracing until the very end:
tracert -w 3 -h 100 216.81.59.173
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