traceroute

What is traceroute#

traceroute (or tracert on Windows) commandline tool is used to display the path between device and destination, displaying source and destination IP addresses for each hop along the way.

How traceroute works#

traceroute uses the time to live (TTL) section of the IP header. Multiple packets are sent to the destination, with TTL value starting from 1 and constantly incremented by one until a packet reaches the final destination.

Request timeout message in the output means that a device is not responding to ping or ICMP traffic.

traceroute usage#

The most simple usage is to specify only the destination domain name or IP address:

traceroute yaroslavgrebnov.com

In order to use IPv6 instead of IPv4, a 6 option should be added:

traceroute -6 yaroslavgrebnov.com