The HSLAB Trace application was developed to be a visual replacement for the standard trace route utility. The fastest way to get the route between your computer and any other computer in the world. A utility that traces a packet from your computer to an Internet host, showing how many hops the packet requires to reach the host and how long each hop takes.
Start it from your desktop or from your Run box, with or without parameters. Just try it - is easy, fast, cool and free. Traceroute works by increasing the "time-to-live" value of each successive batch of packets sent. The first three packets sent have a time-to-live (TTL) value of one (implying that they are not forwarded by the next router and make only a single hop).
The next three packets have a TTL value of 2, and so on. When a packet passes through a host, normally the host decrements the TTL value by one, and forwards the packet to the next host. When a packet with a TTL of one reaches a host, the host discards the packet and sends an ICMP time exceeded (type 11) packet to the sender, or an echo reply (type 0) if its IP address matches the IP address that the packet was originally sent to.
The traceroute utility uses these returning packets to produce a list of hosts that the packets have traversed in transit to the destination. The three timestamp values returned for each host along the path are the delay (latency) values typically in milliseconds (ms) for each packet in the batch.
Traceroute is often used for network troubleshooting. By showing a list of routers traversed, it allows the user to identify the path taken to reach a particular destination on the network. This can help identify routing problems or firewalls that may be blocking ICMP traffic, or high port UDP in UNIX ping, to a site.
Traceroute is also used by penetration testers to gather information about network infrastructure and IP ranges around a given host. It can also be used when downloading data, and if there are multiple mirrors available for the same piece of data, one can trace each mirror to get a good idea of which mirror would be the fastest to use.
The HSLAB Trace tool displays the path Internet packets traverse to reach a specified destination. The tool works by identifying the IP addresses of each hop along the way to the destination network address.
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