Traceroute is used to determine the route a packet takes through the Internet to reach its destination; i.e. the sequence of gateways or "hops" it passes through. Since its inception, traceroute has been widely used for network diagnostics as well as for research in the widest sense.
The basic idea is to send out "probe" packets with artificially small TTL (time-to-live) values, eliciting ICMP "time exceeded" messages from routers in the network, and reconstructing the path from these messages. This is described in more detail under the VanJacobsonTraceroute topic. This original traceroute implementation was followed by many attempts at improving on the idea in various directions: More useful output (often graphically enhanced, sometimes trying to map the route geographically), more detailed measurements along the path, faster operation for many targets ("topology discovery"), and more robustness in the face of packet filters, using different types of suitable probe packets.
traceroute6 is basically just traceroute for IPv6.mtr (Matt's TraceRoute) combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping programs in a single network diagnostic tool.mtr (see above). It is included in recent SmokePing distributions.mtrace) uses IGMP protocol extensions to allow "traceroute" functionality for multicastThere are many TracerouteServers on the Internet that allow running traceroute from other parts of the network.
Researchers from the network measurement community have created large collections of traceroute results to help understand the Internet's topology, i.e. the structure of its connectivity. Some of these collections are available for other researchers. Scamper is an example of a tool that can be used to efficiently obtain traceroute results towards a large number of destinations.
The IETF IPPM WG is standardizing an XML-based format to store traceroute results.
– François Xavier Andreu
– Simon Muyal - 06 Jun 2005
– Simon Leinen - 2005-05-06 - 2020-06-21