how traceroute works

Traceroute is a command line utility used to monitor and diagnose problems in the network path between two hosts. It can be used to troubleshoot routing issues and investigate degraded performance on the network.

Traceroute works by sending control messages, often known as "pings," to see which routers are visited along a transmission path, and how long it takes for each router or node on the network to respond. These packets measure the time taken for a response and visible information about each link in the network path. Each ping consists of three basic pieces of data: the source IP address, destination IP address, and time to live (TTL).

The TTL is an important part of traceroute and represents how many hops a packet can take before its lifetime expires. When a packet arrives at one router, its TTL will decrease with one until it reaches zero. When it gets to zero, the router sends back an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) error message instead of forwarding it further, which allows traceroute to detect each hop it has taken along its route.

Traceroute also works by sending multiple copies of identical packets out at different times allowing for variation in responses from different routers in order to determine potential problems or bottlenecks on different networks or between different locations thus helping pin-point latency issues with greater workloads and network connection speeds over larger networks or geographical locations among other things. That way administrators can assess if there were poor quality links between two points that were responsible for any kind of performance issue occurring when certain applications were being accessed from certain locations at certain times making it great for troubleshooting from both a high level as well as low-level perspective.

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