Toy Traceroute with Ping | Hacker News Reader

Toy Traceroute with Ping

susam.net

31 pointsnreece4 comments

I remember reading that the creator of the original ping command said he was still slightly annoyed decades after that he didn’t also invent traceroute at the same time.

There's a traceroute+ping utility called mtr

https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/

mtr is amazing! Available in most package repositories I've used (Ubuntu, Nix, Arch, CentOS and more), it's lightweight and the output is easy to read.

The website doesn't seem to show an example of the output, it looks something like this: (but without the X's in the IP addresses of course)

                                  My traceroute  [v0.94]
    X (192.168.1.X) -> 1.1.1.1                          2022-02-19T14:08:47+0100
    Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit
                                             Packets               Pings
     Host                                  Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
     1. _gateway                            0.0%     7   12.1   9.7   7.3  12.1   2.0
     2. 254.X.dynamic.X.X                   0.0%     7    6.0   7.8   5.9  11.6   2.2
     3. 10.X.84.X                           0.0%     7    4.6  12.5   4.6  29.2   9.0
     4. 10.X.219.X                          0.0%     7   34.3  34.0  27.0  43.9   5.9
     5. 10.X.34.X                           0.0%     7   33.7  39.4  32.7  67.3  12.5
     6. 10.X.160.X                          0.0%     7   51.2  35.6  31.6  51.2   7.0
     7. 188.X.X.X                           0.0%     7   70.1  54.8  40.3  71.7  12.1
     8. 172.X.X.X                           0.0%     7   63.2  52.1  32.9  92.6  21.9
     9. one.one.one.one                     0.0%     7   40.0  44.0  38.2  61.6   8.4

Runs interactively until you kill/quit it.

Thanks Susam (nreece for posting), I love snippets like this because they're so useful for teaching. Suits the "Socratic/inductive" method of saying "Oh, if only we had a tool that does this kind of route tracing .... Oh wait a minute ... hmm what's traceroute do?"

They also demonstrate the Unix philosophy that more complex tools can be built from smaller ones.

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