What can you do with Traceroute?

Author

Branigan, Steve ; Burch, Hal ; Cheswick, Bill ; Wojcik, Frank

Volume

5

Issue

5

fYear

2001

Firstpage

96

Abstract

Traceroute has been a staple of network administration since the mid-1980s. This well-known utility traces outgoing paths toward network destinations by sending packets with progressively longer time-to-live (TTL) fields and recording their deaths. When a packet dies, most routers return a notice using one of their interface addresses. Traceroute records the addresses, which we can identify using the Domain Name System (DNS). Traceroute is an interactive tool that is not suitable for Unix-style programming with pipes and filters. We have embedded the program´s functions in a filter, which gives us great flexibility in network mapping and other network explorations

Keywords

Internet; computer network management; interactive systems; software packages; telecommunication computing; telecommunication network routing; utility programs; DNS; Domain Name System; Internet; Traceroute; embedded program functions; filter; flexibility; interactive tool; interface addresses; network administration; network destinations; network exploration; network mapping; network route-tracing utility program; outgoing path tracing; packet death recording; packet time-to-live field; routers; Computer networks; Creep; Geography; IP networks; Information filtering; Information filters; Jacobian matrices; Probes; Visual databases; Visualization;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Internet Computing, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1089-7801

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/4236.957902

Filename

957902