man: improvements to language for astraceroute.8

Signed-off-by: Stephen Wadeley <swadeley@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <dborkman@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 30 insertions, 28 deletions

diff --git a/astraceroute.8 b/astraceroute.8
index 34dbc54..baaa9f8 100644
--- a/astraceroute.8
+++ b/astraceroute.8
@@ -13,37 +13,39 @@ astraceroute \- autonomous system trace route utility
 .SH DESCRIPTION
 astraceroute is a small utility to retrieve path information in a traceroute
 like way, but with additional geographical location information. It tracks the
-route of a packet from the local host to the remote host by sucessively
-increasing the IP's TTL field in the hope, that the intermediate node sends a
-ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED notification back to us.
+route of a packet from the local host to the remote host by successively
+increasing the IP's TTL field, starting from 1, in the hope that each intermediate
+node will send an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED notification back to the local host when the
+TTL value is decremented to 0.
 .PP
 astraceroute supports IPv4 and IPv6 queries and will display country and city
-information, if available, as well as the AS number the hop belongs to and its
+information, if available, the AS number the hop belongs to, and its
 ISP name. astraceroute also displays timing information and reverse DNS data.
 .PP
-Due to astraceroute's configurability it is also possible to gather some more
-useful information about the hop regarding what it does and doesn't pass through.
-I.e. astraceroute also allows some clear text strings for probing DPIs or
-``great firewalls'' that would filter out blacklisted critical keywords. This
-tool might be a good start for further in-depth analysis of such systems.
+Due to astraceroute's configurability, it is also possible to gather some more
+useful information about the hop regarding what it does and does not allow to pass
+through. This is done by using clear text strings for probing DPIs or
+``great firewalls'' to determine if they will filter out blacklisted critical 
+keywords. This tool might be a good start for further in-depth analysis of such
+systems.
 .PP
 .SH OPTIONS
 .PP
 .SS -H <host>, --host <host>
 Hostname or IPv4 or IPv6 address of the remote host where the AS route should
-be traced to. In case of an IPv6 address or host, option ``\-6'' must be
+be traced to. In the case of an IPv6 address or host, option ``\-6'' must be
 used. IPv4 is the default.
 .PP
 .SS -p <port>, --port <port>
 TCP port for the remote host to use. If not specified, the default
-port to be used is 80.
+port used is 80.
 .PP
 .SS -i <device>, -d <device>, --dev <device>
 Networking device to start the trace route from, e.g. eth0, wlan0.
 .PP
 .SS -f <ttl>, --init-ttl <ttl>
 Initial TTL value to be used. This option might be useful if you are not
-interested in the first n hops, but only follow-up ones. The default
+interested in the first n hops, but only the following ones. The default
 initial TTL value is 1.
 .PP
 .SS -m <ttl>, --max-ttl <ttl>
@@ -60,8 +62,8 @@ the maximum time astraceroute must wait for an ICMP response from the current
 hop. The default is 3 seconds.
 .PP
 .SS -X <string>, --payload <string>
-Places an ASCII cleartext into the packet payload. Cleartext that
-contains whitespaces must be put into quotes (e.g., "censer me").
+Places an ASCII cleartext string into the packet payload. Cleartext that
+contains whitespace must be put into quotes (e.g.: "censor me").
 .PP
 .SS -l <len>, --totlen <len>
 Specifies the total length of the packet. Payload that does not have a
@@ -87,7 +89,7 @@ different hosts or IP addresses can be placed into geoip.conf, separated by
 a newline.
 .PP
 .SS -L, --latitude
-Also show latitude and longtitude of hops.
+Also show latitude and longitude of hops.
 .PP
 .SS -N, --dns
 Tells astraceroute to perform reverse DNS lookup for hop replies. The
@@ -153,31 +155,31 @@ and do a TCP Xmas probe this time.
 .SS astraceroute -i eth0 -N -H netsniff-ng.org -X "censor-me" -Z
 In this example, we have a Null probe to the remote host netsniff-ng.org, port
 80 (default) and this time, we append the cleartext string "censor-me" into the
-packet payload to test if a firewall/DPI will let this string pass. Such a trace
-could be done once without and once with a blacklisted string to gather possible
-information about censorhsip.
+packet payload to test if a firewall or DPI will let this string pass. Such a trace
+could be done once without, and once with, a blacklisted string to gather possible
+information about censorship.
 .PP
 .SH NOTE
-If a TCP-based probe will fail after a number of retries, astraceroute will
-automatically fall back to ICMP-based probes to pass through firewalls resp.
-routers.
+If a TCP-based probe fails after a number of retries, astraceroute will
+automatically fall back to ICMP-based probes to pass through firewalls 
+and routers used in load balancing for example.
 .PP
-To gather more information about astraceroute's displayed AS numbers, see e.g.,
+To gather more information about astraceroute's displayed AS numbers, see e.g.:
 http://bgp.he.net/AS<number>.
 .PP
 .SH BUGS
 The geographical locations are estimated with the help of Maxmind's GeoIP
-database and can or cannot deviate from the actual real physical location.
-What one can do to decrease a possible error rate is to update the database
-regularly e.g. with astraceroute's \-\-update option.
+database and can differ from the real physical location. To decrease the
+possible errors, update the database regularly using astraceroute's \-\-update
+option.
 .PP
 At some point in time, we need a similar approach to gather more reliable path
-information such as in paris-traceroute.
+information such as in the paris-traceroute tool.
 .PP
 Due to the generic nature of astraceroute, it currently has a built-in mechanism
-to stop the trace after a static number of hops, since the configurable TCP flags
+to stop the trace after a fixed number of hops, since the configurable TCP flags
 can have anything included. It is possible to decrease this number of course.
-In the future, if a SYN probe is sent out, there should be a listener thus we can
+In the future, if a SYN probe is sent out, there should be a listener so that we can
 stop the trace if we detect a handshake in progress.
 .PP
 .SH LEGAL