Josh Wieder

Every year, like clockwork, someone makes sure to do something clever like this. Dont forget to set your max ttl to a little over 100 so you get ALL the lyrics. You don't want to miss out on a Christmas miracle. $ traceroute -m 120 xmas.futile.net traceroute to xmas.futile.net (77.75.106.106), 120 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 ec2-50-112-0-86.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (50.112.0.86) 1.700 ms ec2-50-112-0-82.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (50.112.0.82) 2.160 ms 2.121 ms 2 100.64.1.143 (100.64.1.143) 1.287 ms 100.64.1.157 (100.64.1.157) 1.850 ms 100.64.1.179 (100.64.1.179) 1.514 ms 3 100.64.0.114 (100.64.0.114) 1.697 ms 100.64.0.56 (100.64.0.56) 1.431 ms 100.64.0.66 (100.64.0.66) 1.637 ms 4 100.64.16.89 (100.64.16.89) 0.816 ms 100.64.16.29 (100.64.16.29) 0.870 ms 100.64.16.153 (100.64.16.153) 0.929 ms 5 205.251.232.166 (205.251.232.166) 3.181 ms 2.279 ms 54.239.48.184 (54.239.48.184) 1.175 ms 6 205.251.232.154 (205.251.232.154) 1.731 ms 1.315 ms 205...

The default starting port in UNIX traceroute is 33434. This comes from 32768 (2^15, or the max value of a signed 16-bit integer) + 666 (the mark of Satan). Thank you to Richard Steenbergen of nLayer Communications, Inc. for today's fun fact! You can learn more about traceroute, the deceptively simple and easy to misunderstand diagnostic tool, from Mr Steenbergen's presentation notes on the subject here .