What does it do?

Traceroute is another bundled UNIX tool. It allows you to show the exact route that packets travel from your computer to a target host.

How does it work?

It works similarly to the Ping tool, in the sense that it uses ICMP Echo packets to return each route "hop". The Traceroute tool utilizes an attribute that can be set to any ICMP packet; the "TTL" (Time To Live). This determines how many hops the packet will take before coming back. Traceroute uses this by progressively sending ICMP echo packets to the target, each time with an incremented TTL. This will then ping each router on the path and return it's address, rather than the actual target.

How do I use it?

When you open a Traceroute Window, for most cases, you can just use the default settings, and type the host you want to trace to. If however, you want to either: change the Maximum number of hops a trace will take, specify the number of times each router will be pinged, how long it will wait for a response, how large you would like the ICMP packet to be or whether or not you want it to resolve DNS, then change the options accordingly. Bear in mind that having "Resolve DNS" off, will give much faster responses.

Problems

None that I know of.