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 Trace Route


Traceroute is an elegant program that works from simple principles. The program sends out packets with short lifetimes in order to map the route to another machine. Each packet is given a slightly different lifetime. When a router expires the packet, it sends back a notification. This allows a machine to find all the routers between itself and some other machine on the Internet.

On Windows, this program is also known as tracert or tracert.exe.

Example

Tracing route to www.yahoo.com [204.71.202.160]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1   <10 ms   <10 ms   <10 ms  foo.example.com [192.0.2.167]
  2   <10 ms   <10 ms   <10 ms  192.0.2.1
  3   <10 ms   <10 ms   <10 ms  gw.example.com [10.0.2.29]
  4    47 ms   <10 ms    16 ms  629.hssi2-0-0.gw2.pao1.alter.net [157.130.197.125]
  5   <10 ms   <10 ms    16 ms  119.ATM3-0.XR1.PAO1.ALTER.NET [146.188.147.226]
  6   <10 ms   <10 ms    16 ms  189.ATM8-0-0.BR2.PAO1.ALTER.NET [152.63.49.177]
  7   <10 ms    16 ms    16 ms  Hssi1-1.br2.SNV.globalcenter.net [157.130.193.222]
  8   203 ms   235 ms   203 ms  pos4-1-155M.cr2.SNV.gblx.net [206.132.150.233]
  9   <10 ms    16 ms    15 ms  pos1-0-2488M.hr8.SNV.gblx.net [206.132.254.41]
 10   187 ms   172 ms   188 ms  bas1r-ge3-0-hr8.snv.yahoo.com [208.178.103.62]
 11   <10 ms    15 ms    16 ms  w1.yahoo.com [204.71.202.160]

Trace complete.