13.2 traceroute

Slackware's traceroute(8) command is a very useful network diagnostic tool. traceroute displays each host that a packet travels through as it tries to reach its destination. You can see how many “hops” from the Slackware web site you are with this command:

% traceroute www.slackware.com

Each host will be displayed, along with the response times at each host. Here is an example output:

% traceroute www.slackware.com
traceroute to www.slackware.com (204.216.27.13), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1  zuul.tdn (192.168.1.1)  0.409 ms  1.032 ms  0.303 ms
2  207.171.227.254 (207.171.227.254)  18.218 ms  32.873 ms  32.433 ms
3  border-sf-2-0-4.sirius.com (205.134.230.254) 15.662 ms 15.731 ms 16.142 ms
4  pb-nap.crl.net (198.32.128.20)  20.741 ms  23.672 ms  21.378 ms
5  E0-CRL-SFO-03-E0X0.US.CRL.NET (165.113.55.3) 22.293 ms 21.532 ms 21.29 ms
6  T1-CDROM-00-EX.US.CRL.NET (165.113.118.2)  24.544 ms  42.955 ms 58.443 ms
7  www.slackware.com (204.216.27.13)  38.115 ms  53.033 ms  48.328 ms

traceroute is similar to ping in that it uses ICMP packets. There are several options that you can specify with traceroute. These options are explained in detail in the man page.