====== overview ======

Traceroute is a system administrators utility to trace the route IP packets take from a source system to some destination system.

There are several implementations of this tool. Most distributions include the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Network Research Group version. There is two implementations **written especially for LiNUX**, one by Olaf Kirch and other one by Dmitry Butskoy.

Traceroute uses the IP TTL (Time To Live) parameter to find the route. It sends a packet with a TTL value equal to 1. The first router receives the packet and decreases the TTL. With a TTL equal to 0, the router sends a timeout back to traceroute, with this packet, traceroute knows about the first router. Now, traceroute sends another packet with a TTL equal to 2. The first router decreases the TTL and sends the packet to the second router which decreases it in turn: the TTL is equal to 0...

With this method, traceroute can trace the route to a distant computer.

  * Original by Van Jacobson
    * Maintainers: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Network Research Group <traceroute at ee.lbl.gov>
    * Current Version: traceroute 1.4a12
    * URL: [[http://www-nrg.ee.lbl.gov|LBNL's Network Research Group]]
    * FTP: [[ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/|[1]]]

  * Olaf Kirch version
    * Maintainers: Olaf Kirch <okir at lst.de>
    * Current Version: traceroute 20060926
    * FTP: [[ftp://ftp.lst.de/pub/people/okir/traceroute|[2]]]

  * Dmitry Butskoy version
    * Maintainers: Dmitry Butskoy <Dmitry at Butskoy.name>
    * Current Version: traceroute 2.0.4
    * URL: [[http://dmitry.butskoy.name/traceroute|http://dmitry.butskoy.name/traceroute]]

  * Daniel Borkmann's version (with AS, GeoIP information)
    * Maintainers: Daniel Borkmann <borkmann at iogearbox.net>
    * Current Version: astraceroute 0.5.8 (netsniff-ng toolkit)
    * URL: [[http://netsniff-ng.org/|http://netsniff-ng.org/]]
====== Links ======

  * Debian
    * Bugs: [[http://bugs.debian.org/traceroute|bugs.debian.org/traceroute]]
    * Package State: [[http://packages.qa.debian.org/t/traceroute.html|packages.qa.debian.org/traceroute]]
  * Redhat/Fedora
    * Bugs: [[https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?component=traceroute|bugzilla.redhat.com]]