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Concept
Traceroute
Summary
In computing, traceroute and tracert are computer network diagnostic commands for displaying possible routes (paths) and measuring transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol (IP) network. The history of the route is recorded as the round-trip times of the packets received from each successive host (remote node) in the route (path); the sum of the mean times in each hop is a measure of the total time spent to establish the connection. Traceroute proceeds unless all (usually three) sent packets are lost more than twice; then the connection is lost and the route cannot be evaluated. Ping, on the other hand, only computes the final round-trip times from the destination point.
For Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) the tool sometimes has the name traceroute6 and tracert6.
The command traceroute is available on many modern operating systems. On Unix-like systems such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux it is available as a command line tool. Traceroute is also graphically accessible in macOS within the Network Utilities suite; these utilities have been deprecated since the release of macOS Big Sur.
Microsoft Windows and ReactOS provide a program named tracert that performs the same route-tracing function. Windows NT-based operating systems also provide PathPing, which combines the functionality of ping with that of tracert. The ReactOS version was developed by Ged Murphy and is licensed under the GPL.
On Unix-like operating systems, traceroute sends, by default, a sequence of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets, with destination port numbers ranging from 33434 to 33534; the implementations of traceroute shipped with Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and macOS include an option to use ICMP Echo Request packets (-I), or any arbitrary protocol (-P) such as UDP, TCP using TCP SYN packets, or ICMP.
On Windows, tracert sends ICMP Echo Request packets, rather than the UDP packets traceroute sends by default.
The time-to-live (TTL) value, also known as hop limit, is used in determining the intermediate routers being traversed towards the destination.
Official source
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