At 04:00 17-02-00 , Peter Newton wrote:
>Thanks J.P.Ambrutis and others for your help 
>on the "Hosting Sugestions" thread. J.P my 
>curiosity is drawn towards this "traceroute" 
>that you are able to do, looks like a "must have".

traceroute is a utility that relies on the pragmatic reality that most
datagram with the same IP 5-tuple take the same route (they don't ~have~ to
do so, but...).

So what it does is sent an ECHO datagram with a TTL (time to live) value of
one, then of two, then of three, etc, and note the return information.
Actually, it repeats each three times. So in effect it shows each hop in
the datagram's travels.

Sometimes (often) you want to do a traceroute from your host to a
destination. The traceroute utility program will do that (name shortened to
tracert in Windows systems). Given at the shell (or Windows command) prompt.

Occasionally, particularly for the more ~interesting~ situations, you want
to do a traceroute from some other point(s) in the network. A number of
services will do this for you. Boardwatch magazine
(http://www.boardwatch.com) has a list of such services, someone posted
another to this thread.

Note that traceroute indicates that the host is alive only at the lowest
levels, and some sites (such as www.microsoft.com) are unable (or
unwilling) to respond. In practice, for UN*X hosts it seems to give some
suggestion that the host is alive, while for Windows it seems to tell
little beyond that the host not being in a blue screen of death state.

traceroute  is largely a network diagnostic tool. Do keep in mind that
Internet routing is frequently _not_  symmetrical... it is not unusual to
have different routings between hither and twain as compared with between
twain and hither.

>I would appreciate any help in showing me HOW
>this can be done.

At the shell prompt:
	traceroute hostname.tld
	traceroute 10.20.30.40

At the Windows DOS box prompt
	tracert hostname.tld
	tracert 10.20.30.40

Safe computing,  /Harold
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Harold A. Driscoll                 mailto:Harold(at)Driscoll.Chi.IL.US
#include <std/disclaimer>                 http://Driscoll.Chi.IL.US

• Web Designer Courses
• Off the Shelf Training Courses

HWG hwg-techniques mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA