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.