Traceroute on a Map using Pingdom API, MaxMind, and D3

Today, I was looking at the traceroute module for NodeJS and was thinking about combining the results of a traceroute with a geolocation service that translates the IP addresses into Geo coordinates that can be placed on a world map built with D3. MaxMind Geolocation database seemed like a good idea and I was trying to figure out how to do that on Redis for nodeJS. Then I stumbled on GeoIP which seems to make it easier to use MaxMind with Node. Actually, Philip Tellis created geoip-lite which is a native NodeJS API for the GeoLite data from MaxMind. MapTail, for example, uses geoip-lite to display visitors on a realtime map.

But, I do not have a public server with NodeJS and when I noticed that Pingdom tools has a traceroute method in their API, I decided to implement this project in PHP, using curl to retrieve traceroute information from the Pingdom API, converting IP to location using MaxMind on MySQL, and placing the geo coordinates on a D3.js map. Let’s get started.
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