Hostwinds Tutorials
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When troubleshooting connection issues to your website or your server, one of the tools you have at your disposal is the traceroute tool as a network troubleshooting tool. Traceroute comes in handy when you're trying to diagnose routing issues over large networks. This command-line tool will print out the route taken by a packet between your computer and its destination displaying each hop taken between routers. Operating systems such as Windows and Linux have traceroute utility already installed by default.
To perform a Trace Route In Windows, you must first open the command prompt.
C:\>tracert
Replace with your domain name, IP Address, or server name for your Hostwinds server
What you'll see is a numbered set of lines. Each line represents what's called a hop which is the path the packets take from router to router until it makes its final destination or fails. The columns you see are the times it took to make each hop in milliseconds and gives you an idea of the latency between each hop.
Performing a traceroute is essentially the same in Linux. The difference is the name of the command. In Windows, the command you use is tracert, wherein in Linux, the command's name is traceroute. As stated earlier, both of the tools are used in the command line terminal.
traceroute
Replace with your domain name, IP Address, or server name for your Hostwinds server
What you see is a similar output, much like you did in Windows. This tool is not simply limited to that one string. There's actually more to it as it has several command primers that you can leverage to get a more detailed output and further assist your troubleshooting.
For more information on the command, primers consult the man page like so: man traceroute.
Additionally, this tool also exists in Mac, and the processes are literally the same. All you have to do is start typing the terminal in your search. Once you have the terminal up, just run through the same steps as above. With Mac being a Unix-based operating system just like Linux, the command traceroute will be the same.
There may be times when a traceroute is requested by our Support Team. To provide this information through any open tickets, you can do the following steps:
If you receive an error that says 'traceroute is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program, or batch file, check the command in c:\windows\system32. There should be a file called the 'TRACERT.EXE' file, and you can run this from there.
Written by Hostwinds Team / April 11, 2018