Kus' Blog

Most of us while troubleshooting network failures use the well known traceroute which shows the path between to network points and latency in each ‘hop’ in this path. Its really helpful in order to see where packets are dropped.

Mytraceroute introduces a dynanic way of seeing the path information and allowing us a quick shot on the network problem. When using traceroute it was little hard to find which part of the network was loosing some packets packets, and not all of them; with mytraceroute you can see packet loosing as a percentage in the reporting interface.

$ mtr google.es to start it. Now MTR will start looping making a traceroute to the host choosen. What we will see is the path of the packets to destination and 2 main columns, Packets and Pings. In Packets columns you will see the % of Loss and where it happens, there you will find a faulty router . The Pings column gives us all the information related to time.

Time for fun. Try mtr to different servers that may be in different locations, in my ISP (Ono) I have spotted a couple of routers that are loosing packets, which impacts in the overall connection performance.

Have Fun!