traceroute

TRACEROUTE

Definition

This is another program for network tesing, measurement and management. In ping , we did not know the route the packets have taken to reach the target and back. But in case of a failure in the network, as network administrtor, there may be a requirement to locate where in the network, there is a failure. Traceroute will help to great extent.

Traceroute allows us to determine the path a packet is taking across the network. It looks up each machine on the path to the destination host and displays the IP address and name for that hop. With each name is number of milliseconds to get the information.

It again uses the TTL field in the header of IP packets. So in order to understand the complete gambit, I need to study the nuts and bolts of TCP/IP.

Test Results
I used traceroute again on our website from all-nettools.com and received the following results.

Traceroute csa.iisc.ernet.in (144.16.67.8)

Hop

IP Address

Hostname

Average RTT¹

192.168.1.9

bodhi.pair.net

4.10 ms

64.214.174.177

so-2-1-0.ar2.cle1.gblx.net

5.06 ms

67.17.68.125

pos4-0-622m.cr2.cle1.gblx.net

3.55 ms

67.17.71.5

pos1-0-2488m.cr2.wdc2.gblx.net

14.74 ms

67.17.67.57

so2-1-0-2488m.ar1.dca3.gblx.net

5.26 ms

154.54.10.117

p1-3.pr01.iad01.atlas.psi.net

22.73 ms

154.54.1.185

p1-1.core01.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com

16.84 ms

66.28.4.22

p15-0.core02.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com

17.40 ms

66.28.4.82

p6-0.core01.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com

27.37 ms

66.28.6.58

g49.ba01.b001105-2.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com

22.93 ms

38.112.5.62

vindeshsancharnigamltd.demarc.cogentco.com

24.27 ms

202.54.2.17

485.47 ms

202.54.2.62

bgl-mum-atm-pvc.bbone.vsnl.net.in

432.83 ms

202.54.91.249

ernet-blr-vsnl.bng.vsnl.net.in

517.32 ms

202.141.1.2

836.23 ms

Time-out

19	Destination host unreachable

¹ RTT - round-trip time

The results showed all the hops and the RTT at each hop. In the results shown the packets got timed out in between.

Probing...

The source I have listed gives an interesting example of tracing a spam message. We all are recepients of spam sometime or other. Ever thought of tracing one? I keep this as an exercise using the tools available.

Source
www.all-nettools.com
unix man pages.