How To Trace The Route Followed By The Data Packet

How To Trace The Route Followed By The Data Packet

There are tools available in Linux as well as Windows OS that allows you to trace the route followed by the data packet to reach your System. For the Linux OS, the command is “traceroute”. It follows the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). A similar command named as “tracert” is available in Windows OS too. But it uses Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) instead of UDP. You might get different results from these two different commands as they use different protocols, although the Shortest relay path is shown each time.

You can specify the hostname or even IP Address, or you can specify flags along with the IP Address to save time consumed in DNS lookup. The result after running the command will contain the IP Addresses of all the relay points.

The following screenshot shows the usage of this command in Linux OS.

You can just type the command the terminal to see the usage of different flags.