What can you do with Traceroute?

Traceroute has been a staple of network administration since the mid-1980s. This well-known utility traces outgoing paths toward network destinations by sending packets with progressively longer time-to-live (TTL) fields and recording their deaths. When a packet dies, most routers return a notice using one of their interface addresses. Traceroute records the addresses, which we can identify using the Domain Name System (DNS). Traceroute is an interactive tool that is not suitable for Unix-style programming with pipes and filters. We have embedded the program's functions in a filter, which gives us great flexibility in network mapping and other network explorations.