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"Building a Traceroute tool from scratch in Go: A Step-by-Step Guide"
Traceroute is a tool that can be used to track the route that a packet takes from a source to a destination. It works by sending packets with increasing time-to-live (TTL) values, and then measuring the time it takes for the packets to reach their destination or be returned as "time exceeded" messages.
Here is a basic implementation of traceroute in Go:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"net"
"os"
"time"
)
func main() {
target := os.Args[1]
fmt.Println("Tracerouting", target)
for i := 1; i <= 30; i++ {
conn, err := net.Dial("udp", target+":33434")
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Failed to connect:", err)
return
}
defer conn.Close()
conn.SetDeadline(time.Now().Add(time.Second))
_, err = conn.Write([]byte{1, byte(i), 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0})
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Failed to send data:", err)
return
}
reply := make([]byte, 1024)
_, addr, err := conn.ReadFrom(reply)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Failed to receive data:", err)
return
}
fmt.Printf("%d: %s\n", i, addr.String())
}
}
This program takes a single command-line argument, which is the target host to trace the route to. It then repeatedly sends UDP packets to the target with incrementing TTL values, and waits for a reply. The address of the host that replied is printed out along with the TTL value that was used.