Traceroute Tutorial

All communication across a network is broken into packets before sending and is reassembled at the receiving end. Suppose you are sending a 100 page letter to someone and their mailslot is only big enough for one page at a time. So we have to send each page in its own envelope with its own addressing and stamp. Several things can happen:

All the envelopes are delivered without mishap.
None of the envelopes are delivered (either you or the receiver or both are not online, your ISP has router difficulty, a "backbone" break has occurred too close to your location, or Texas or Colorado has been hit in a preemptive tactical nuclear strike).
Some of the envelopes are delivered.

Usually the latter case occurs. Most systems measure success by how many of the envelopes are delivered. Some protocols will try to resend lost envelopes.

When packets are mashed or don't arrive at all, each web browsers will give slightly different error messages. Some are just downright misleading about what happened. Usually they will notify you that the server is down. Nope, not right. To prove this to yourself, you can examine your logs. While you were not getting on everyone else was. So the server was fine. It was your ISP or some other problem.

Where is the Break?

Missing or delayed packets are the cause of 99.9% percent of a connection difficulty. The first step in diagnosing connection problems is to run a traceroute (tracert). This will help to determine what path your connection takes across the Internet to reach our servers. The traceroute tool is not intended to gauge your Internet connection as a whole but to show the specific path you take to a specific location. If you have a Windows95, Windows98, or WindowsNT computer, you can use the built-in traceroute program to do this.

Macintosh users can get a free traceroute utility from allmacintosh.com

Click on the 'start' button and go to 'programs'. Choose 'MS-DOS prompt'
('Command Prompt' in NT) and at the 'c:\windows>' prompt, type:

tracert yourdomainname.com

You will be presented with a string of numbers representing the connect times of three packets sent to the next server in line through which you must pass on your way to our server. That server then sends three packets to the next server in line and reports those times back to you. If you see an asterisk (*) in place of a connect time, this means that packet was placed on a network wire at the same time another server placed a packet on the wire and they overwrote each other (commonly called a data collision). This is indicative of heavy traffic on that network and three asterisks on the same line mean that may be a dead connection. In this case we suggest logging off and logging back on to your ISP to see if you can get a different connect route. If you see long connect times (consistently in excess of 400ms), the server on that "hop" may be busy servicing other packets. If you see that the hops completely cease at one particular point, these means their is a major backbone outage and no traffic is moving through that area. If this is too close to your ISP, you will be completely shut out of the Internet until the break is corrected by the backbone provider (AT&T, UUNet, etc.).

This traceroute is only a snapshot of network traffic at that moment in time. It should be run several times to determine the "trends" of the traffic. To save it to a file for future reference, type:

This will create a file in the root directory of your hard drive named 'trace.txt' that you can then view with 'notepad'. Any subsequent traces can be appended to the trace.txt file with:

    tracert yourdomainname.com >> C:\trace.txt

You will see in the traceroute results your final IP address to the DNS server at the server site. The next step is to determine the path that the server's packets take to you. You can connect to your site via the built-in Windows95/98 telnet program. Our telnet/SSH tutorial explains the steps (WindowsNT has the same Telnet program built-in).

Once you are at the telnet prompt on the server, type:

    traceroute your.local.IP.address

Your local IP address will be shown at the bottom of the page. If the number at the bottom of our home page is 209.61.157.241 for example, the te.netmand would be:

    traceroute 209.61.157.241

The results of these server side traceroutes can be cut and pasted into a local file via notepad.exe or this command will send the results to you via e-mail:

The symbol between the the IP address and "mail" above is known as "the pipe" and should be above the backslash on your keyboard.

If looking at the results of these traceroutes, both to and from the server does not yield any obvious answers regarding your connection, email them to us and we will investigate further. If the results point to specific traffic congestion somewhere between you and the sever, logging off your Internet connection and reconnecting may help. This may cause your ISP to assign you a different temporary local IP address which may take a different path to the server.