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Life & fun · December 5, 2023

How did your computer reach my server?

A cool-as-shit dynamic traceroute powered by custom software, married with an informative article about how the BGP routing protocol works and guides the shape of the Internet.

How did your computer reach my server? launched on December 5, 2023 with 659 votes, #12 of 3,780 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.

Visit how-did-i-get-here.net ↗Alternativestop 1% of December 2023

In plain words

How did your computer reach my server?" is a network visualization tool that traces and displays the path data takes from a user's device to a web server. Launched in December 2023, it allows people to understand internet connectivity and routing in an interactive way. The tool is useful for anyone curious about how internet infrastructure works or for educational purposes in learning about network protocols and data transmission paths.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Seems like this hit the Hacker News front page again, and my server's having some trouble serving all of you. I made some hotfixes and the traceroutes seem to be working again, but you might need to be a bit patient :) This part of the page is still loading while I wait for the above traceroute to load. To reach this website, your computer sent some packets across the Internet. If we’re curious what that path was, we can run a tool to generate a traceroute — a rough list of every server your packets touched to reach their destination. To build this website ( source code on GitHub ), I wrote my own traceroute program called ktr ( also open source ) that can stream results in real time while…from how-did-i-get-here.net

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