Network Utilities - Traceroute
Traceroute is a tool to print the route a packet takes to a network host.
Contents:


How many Hops?

Every Hop is a point which reported an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED. Some packets take several dozen hops until it reaches its destination. But normally not in an Local Area Network ;) Standard is 30 and myximum is 99.

Packet Length

The packet length (in bytes) is the size of the data a probe should carry with.

How many sec between sending each packet?

How many sec should traceroute wait after sending a packet before it sends the next packet.

Initial Time-To-Live

To show the route of a packet, traceroute sends several packets with an incrementing time-to-live. So one gateway after gateway (which reduces the TTL) will answer that this packet has been dropped. If you want traceroute to start with the 10th gateway you would enter a Initial TTL of 10.

Verbosity Output?

Received ICMP packets other than TIME_EXCEEDED and UNREACHABLEs are listed.

Numeric Output only?

Print hop adresses numerically rather than symbolically and numerically (saces a nameserver address-to-name lookup for each gateway found on the path).

Bypass routing tables?

From the man page of ping: If the host is not a directly-attached network, an error is returned. This option can be used to ping a local host through an interface that has no route through it.

Use ICMP instead of UDP?

Use ICMP ECHO instead of UDP datagrams.

Toggle checksums

Normally, this prevents traceroute from calculating checksums. In some cases, the operating system can overwrite parts of the outgoing packet but not recalculate the checksum (so in some cases the default is to not calculate checksums and using -x causes them to be calculated). Note that checksums are usually required for the last hop when using ICMP ECHO probes.

Socket level debugging

Enable socket level debugging.