Traceroute - A Great Diagnostic Tool On Every PC and MAC
Peter Easton • 26 November 2012
Traceroute or “Tracert” is a command line utility that measures the speed and the route that the data takes to a reach a destination server.
Traceroute will send several test data packets to the destination server and will record each router that it goes throughand the time it takes to reach the destination server.
Each router can be owned by a different network provider.
Each router is known as a “Hop” and the data will have to go through many “Hops” on its journey to the destination server.
Traceroute is a useful tool for diagnosing network problems, most often speed issues.
For example, if your remote desktop is slow to respond, then it might mean that there is a network problem somewhere between you and the desktop.
Browsing may be fine, but because the amount of traffic flow is substantially different to that of a web browser, and the route taken will be different, this may not be a clear indication that all is well with the line connection to your desktop.
Open a Command Prompt window
From your local PC, NOT the remote desktop, open a Command Prompt window to use the “tracert” command.
This is also available for Mac users in the Terminal.
The process is slightly different depending upon which version of Windows you are using.
Windows Vista and Windows 7
All other versions of Windows
Click Start, then Run. A new text box will appear. Enter cmd into this box and click OK.
Example
This example will demonstrate how to perform a “tracert” for services.trisysglobal.com and explain the output that you will see.
To perform a trace open a Command Prompt window as above, and enter the following, and press <enter> on your keyboard.
tracert services.trisysglobal.com
The trace may take a few moments to complete.
C:\>tracert services.trisysglobal.com
Tracing route to services.trisysglobal.com [79.125.118.112]...
1 <1ms <1ms <1ms 61.d3.5446.static.theplanet.com [70.84.211.97]
2 20ms 20ms 20ms po101.dsr02.dllstx5.networklayer.com [70.87.254.5]
3 19ms 19ms 19ms po52.dsr02.dllstx3.networklayer.com [70.85.127.109]
4 19ms 19ms 20ms ae17.bbr02.eq01.dal03.networklayer.com [173.192.18.230]
5 29ms 24ms 25ms dls-bb1-link.telia.net [80.239.195.177]
6 24ms 21ms 21ms nyk-bb2-link.telia.net [213.155.130.208]
7 29ms 19ms 19ms ldn-bb2-link.telia.net [213.155.135.66]
8 22ms 21ms 22ms dln-b2-link.telia.net [80.91.247.69]
9 25ms 25ms 27ms amazon-ic-150369-dln-b2.c.telia.net [80.239.167.146]
10 32ms 31ms 31ms [178.236.0.208]
11 33ms 32ms 31ms [178.236.0.213]
12 33ms 32ms 32ms ec2-79-125-0-139.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws [79.125.0.139]
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * * Request Timed Out
16 * * * Request Timed Out
What does the output mean?
There are 5 columns.
Hop Count
Three packets of data columns
Name of the router and ipaddress
1 <1ms <1ms <1ms 61.d3.5446.static.theplanet.com [70.84.211.97]
Traceroute will actually send three packets of data, and measure the time taken for each.
At hop 1 you can see that each packet took less than a millisecond, (<1 ms ) This is normally your local network and Internet router. You would expect any packet on your local network to take less than 1 millisecond to reach your router.
You can see that the server at hop 1 is called 61.d3.5446.static.theplanet.com, and its address on the Internet is 70.84.211.97.
We have seen slowness happen when anything greater than 40-50ms is seen at multiple hops
A real customer trace was recently taken recently when slowness on the desktop was seen.
(Addresses have been removed to protect the customer location)
Tracing route to services.trisysglobal.com [79.125.118.112] over a maximum of 20 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 Local.Router
2 303 ms 308 ms 309 ms
3 390 ms 354 ms 367 ms
4 265 ms 375 ms 405 ms
5 384 ms 357 ms 343 ms
6 291 ms 341 ms 411 ms
7 448 ms 549 ms 287 ms
8 123 ms 79 ms 223 ms
9 348 ms 367 ms 373 ms
10 464 ms 495 ms 546 ms
11 408 ms 473 ms 287 ms
12 401 ms 421 ms 435 ms
13 501 ms 585 ms 525 ms
14 309 ms 277 ms 190 ms
15 663 ms 527 ms 372 ms ec2-79-125-0-4.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com [79.125.0.4]
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
As you can see the 1st hop is the internal router (less than 1 millisecond) and then the lag on each hop indicates a line issue.
What does Request timed out mean?
Hop number 16 onwards shows no response or “Request timed out”
This is because the server at those hops is not accepting Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) traffic. As this is what traceroute uses to get the results.
A Request timed out message is usually nothing to worry about, as many network providers may disable ICMP traffic.
Destination net unreachable
Traceroute can detect if a packet has been stopped on the network. If this occurs you will see the error Destination net unreachable. This error is often caused by a misconfiguration in someone’s router settings, or an IP address that doesn't exist.
You can use “tracert” to diagnose line connection issues by running the command as described above or by downloading our “trace,bat” file, which will run this command and output to a test file for you.
“http://www.trisys.co.uk/support/documents/downloads/trace.zip”
Unzip the contents to your LOCAL PC’s desktop NOT TRISYS and run, the output filename is “trace.txt”.
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