Gnation Development And Support

Home - Project page - Status - Download May 31, 2001

Welcome to the Gnation homepage...

Gnation is a multipurpose tool to determine (or guess) the geography of a remote host based on country-code top-level domains, IP ranges, and WHOIS lookups. It can at least determine the host's country of origin with a reasonably high level of accuracy.

While useful as a stand-alone tool, Gnation can be more. We are adding the capability to read through lists of address- possibly from web server logs- and generate statistics of usage by country and state. Gnation will also be able to plot hits and distributions onto a world map for better visualization.

Another planned feature is an interface to traceroute(8) that can display on a world map the path your data takes to reach a remote host. With these two map-features combined, a commercial website could see which data routes are being most heavily used from what locations in the world, and be able to add new servers in strategic locations to maximize speed for all users.