Traceroute

Invoking traceroute with no specified options displays the list of available options, while man traceroute presents more details, including the displayed error flags.

Mtr combines the functionality of ping and traceroute into one tool, allowing users to both detect packet loss along a route, as well as obtain detailed information about the latency of each hop.

The traceroute hit a Cloudflare node at an Internet exchange point in Sao Paulo, and Cloudflare’s website indicates that it has a node available in Fortaleza as well.

MTR is an enhanced version of ICMP traceroute available for Unix-like and Windows systems.

PathPing is a utility introduced with Windows NT that combines ping and traceroute functionality.

Proceeding in this way, traceroute uses the returned ICMP Time Exceeded messages to build a list of routers that packets traverse, until the destination is reached and returns an ICMP Echo Reply message.

The program traceroute uses these ICMP Time Exceeded messages to print the routers used by packets to go from the source to the destination.

The traceroute utility usually has an option to instead use ICMP Echo Request (type 8) packets, like the Windows tracert utility does, or to use TCP SYN packets.

The various implementations of traceroute all rely on ICMP Time Exceeded (type 11) packets being sent to the source.

Time exceeded messages are used by the traceroute utility to identify gateways on the path between two hosts.

Traceroute is also used by penetration testers to gather information about network infrastructure and IP ranges around a given host.

Traceroute proceeds unless all (three) sent packets are lost more than twice, then the connection is lost and the route cannot be evaluated.