Traceroute "./configure" hiccup

[Peter Jones]

Hello,

I'm not entirely sure if this is a traceroute problem or an autoconf problem 
(having never used autoconf, I'm not sure how much of the script comes from 
each party), so I'll send it to both addresses.

Simply, the "configure" script supplied as part of "traceroute-1.4a12.tar.gz" 
attempts to identify "routing table type" as one of either "mib", "socket", 
"linux" or "generic" (at around line 1825).  To identify "linux" it tests for 
the existence of /proc/net/route -- and herein lies the potential problem.  If 
you run "./configure" as root, there is no problem (and perhaps, since 
traceroute must be run by root (or setuid root) this isn't *much* of a 
problem...)  However, general practice for configuring and compiling programs 
from source, as near as I can tell, is to run "./configure" and "make" as a 
regular user, and only switch to root for the 'make install'.

Perhaps the simplest solution is to specifically state in the traceroute 
INSTALL file that './configure' must be run as root.  (If the test itself is 
being generated by autoconf ... I don't know what to suggest there.)

The problem I was experiencing with traceroute was that I was getting the 
message "Warning: Multiple interfaces found: using 127.0.0.1 @ lo" -- and 
needless to say, nothing worked after that.  Certainly this problem could be 
avoided using "traceroute -i eth0", but I had never done that (or needed to do 
that) in the past.  A search on google turned up quite a few people running 
into similar problems (although only one defaulting to 'lo') but no suitable 
solution.  Finally I turned to the source, and when I realised that the 
"Multiple interfaces found" string only appeared in 'findsaddr-generic.c' (and 
that 'findsaddr-linux.c' obviously wasn't being linked in on my linux system) 
it became obvious where the problem was coming from...

(Since I am building a gentoo system (www.gentoo.org) I shall pass this on to 
them: although their 'emerge' program needs to be run as root, it must switch 
back to a lesser user for much of the compiling process!)

Regards,
Pete.