Description:
Hmm. I think that describes its use pretty well. What does it do?
Oh. Well it sends UDP packets with the time-to-live set to 1, then 2
then 3 and so on. This causes the routers that these packets are sent
through to complain after the requisite number of hops. I.E. the first router
complains about the first packets, with TTL set to one, the second about
the packets with TTL set to two etc. Traceroute catches the complaints
and times how long it took. This not only shows you how your packets
are getting to the destination, but sometimes, where the congestion
is as well. There's a lots better explanation in the source, so
if you want more,
UTSL.
This version of traceroute is used in traceroute.cgi,
which isn't required,
just handy on occasion, and in do-traceroute, which you don't need unless
you're curious about your routing and how it's changing over time. The only
extra options that do-traceroute uses are the -A
option to look up the
ASN (Autonomous System Number) and the -O
option to look up the DNS owner.
Last updated Thu Mar 17 17:00:10 UTC 2005 by <thomas.erskine@sourceworks.com>.
[