have143fun
October 8th, 2005, 04:55 PM
Hi guyz,
howz it goin on in here?
I have joined this forums today... after seeing it for the past 1 month or so.. and getting interest in it..
And my doubt is:
Q. What is traceroute and how does it work exactly?
Waiting for ur replies...
thx a lot to all of u..
wildfrog
October 9th, 2005, 10:19 AM
What is tracerouteTraceroute is an utility to determine the route (the nodes in between) from a "source" to a "target" machine.
and how does it work exactly?Well, every IP packet has a value called TTL (time to live). When a packet is forwarded form one node to another this value is decremented by one, and if reaches 0, the packet is considered "dead", and the node sends a ICMP message back to the source telling it that the packet "died". This ICMP message identifies the node.
If you start by sending a packet with TTL=1, the first node it reaches will reply with an ICMP. You now got the address of the first node.
Then you send a second packet with TTL=2. This will identify the second node. You'll continue sending packets with increasing TTLs until you finally read the target node. This way you should have gotten ICMPs from all the node between the source and the target address.
- petter