About the online Traceroute tool
The Traceroute tool shows the path that IP packets take from our server in Dallas, TX, USA to the IP address you enter (or the first IP address associated with the domain you enter). It provides a way of detecting where network communication might be breaking down, shows the time required to reach routers on the path, and gives information about the networks leading to the destination.
Traceroute works by sending ICMP echo requests with increasing hop limits, then listening for TTL-expired-in-transit errors and echo replies.
NOTE
Traceroute is not a way to discover the name or IP address of a hacker or spammer—it just traces the network path from one known address (ours) to another (the one you entered). The first address in the path is always ours.
Contents
Form fields
In most cases the default options will work well, and you need only enter the domain name or IP address of the destination.
- to
- Specifies the domain name or IP address of the server or host to which you want to trace the route. If you enter a domain name, the tool will use the first IP address associated with the domain. The tool won’t run if this field is blank.
- IP version
-
Specifies the IP version to use for the trace.
If you enter a domain name for the destination, “Auto” will cause the tool itself to choose the IP version based on what IP addresses are available for that domain. If you choose to require IPv6 or IPv4, the destination domain must have an IP address of that version for the tool to continue.
If you enter an IP address for the destination, the IP version should be set to “Auto” or to the version of the address you’ve entered.
- don’t resolve IP addresses
- Causes the tool to skip looking up the domain name associated with the IP address of each hop. This can make the trace proceed more quickly in some cases, though it forgoes the benefit of the domain names.
Results
The tool produces a table in which each row represents a hop—an IP router along the path—leading to the destination on the last row. The columns are as follows:
- hop
- The hop number, with hop 1 being the first router beyond our server—our default gateway, in other words.
- RTT
- Round-Trip Time in milliseconds. This is the time it takes for a packet to reach the router and be echoed back to our server. Each hop gets three tries and thus will have three round-trip times. If there’s an asterisk (
*) in a column, it means that the request packet didn’t get a reply within 1 second. Sometimes you may see other errors in the RTT columns. - IP address
- The IP address of the router or destination host that replied to the request packet. If none of the requests got a response, there will be no IP address to show for the hop.
- fully qualified domain name
- The domain name of the router or destination host that replied to the request packet. If one of the request packets gets a response and thus an IP address for the hop, Traceroute will attempt a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address to get a domain name. If that succeeds, the domain name will appear in this column.