What is the "Traceroute" app.

[beammeup]

I've just been setting up little snitch and in my user rules I've added an application called 'traceroute' and I've denied all access, till I know what it is.

I can't find it with Spotlight, and I was wondering if anyone can shed some light on what this app does? Thanks.

 

[yankeefan24]

Google is your friend

or

Another friend from Google

 

[Applespider]

The GUI for traceroute lives in the Network Utility app although you can run it from the Terminal directly too.

What it does, when you enter any IP address or domain name, is track the route that your request takes to get to the site. So you can see how many 'hops' it takes for your site to appear and how long it takes to get at each one.

It can be useful if something feels very slow or there's net congestions since you can check where the problem lies - with your router, with your ISP or with one of the Level 3 servers etc

 

[Kaioshin]

You can open Terminal.app and type in "man traceroute" for some information about this command.
But in short it can be used to find out the route packets have to take to reach a remote server over the internet. They... trace the route... trace-route.

 

[Queso]

Traceroute basically performs a series of requests to find the network path to a specified direction. It uses ICMP, the same protocol as Ping.

Traceroute will query each router in the path one-by-one for it's network address then report that back to your Mac. So the result of the command gives the address of every hop on the path in a list. It will also give the Round Trip Time in milliseconds for the request to be returned from the router, so can also be used to see which stage on the path to the destination is causing a bottleneck if you are appearing to experience a network slowdown.

It's very useful for network troubleshooting. Test it yourself from the terminal by typing the following command

Traceroute www.apple.com

 

[beammeup]

Thanks for all those thorough replies. Yes it didn't even occur to me to look up google for this particular thing. Sorry about that.

As long as it reports back to my beloved mac then that's OK. I'll turn it back on.

Now I've got a new thing to play with in Terminal. Hurray.

Just because I'm paranoid it doesn't mean theyre not trying to get me, eh?