Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Tracing Connections with traceroute

When you’re connecting to a remote computer, you’re actually connecting through a series of computers (and routers and other expensive Internet stuff). That is, your computer connects to another computer, which connects to another, which connects to yet another, and so on until your computer connects to the one you’re trying to reach.

The data that you’re sending or receiving actually meanders through the path in packets (little chunks of data) that are reassembled into the correct sequence at the other end. But not all packets take precisely the same route from the sending computer to the destination computer. Communication on the Internet is much more like sending a lot of letters than making a telephone ...