[Term of the Day]: Traceroute
Term of the Day
"Traceroute"
What is Traceroute?
Traceroute, also known as Tracert is a network utility tool that is used to diagnose problems on a network path. It shows the route over the network between two systems and IP addresses.
Traceroute uses Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) which is a network layer protocol that is used for error reporting.
Assume you are accessing a website and it takes too long to load pages. Traceroute allows you to trace a packet from your computer to an Internet host recording every hop along the way and helps you find which hop takes a longer time.
The original traceroute is a UNIX utility, but nearly all platforms have something similar. The command can be run from a Unix or DOS command line by typing tracert [domain name], where [domain name] is either the domain name or the IP address of the system you are trying to reach. For example:
This utility works by sending echo packets with variable time to live (TTL) values. The response time of each hop is calculated. To guarantee the accuracy, each hop is queried multiple times (usually three times) to measure the response of that particular hop better.