What is a traceroute and how does it work?
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CloseYou are here: Home > Website Support > Troubleshooting Network Difficulties
If you experience a slow or intermittent connection, knowing what route your computer takes to your website or email server will be helpful for troubleshooting.
A facility available on your computer called ‘Traceroute’ is able to generate a report for you see this information.
Use the following steps to run ‘Traceroute’ for Windows operating system or view UNIX or Mac steps:
- Click the ‘Start’ button
- Select ‘Accessories’
- Select ‘C:// Command Prompt (MS-DOS Prompt)’
- When the C:/ prompt appears, Type ‘tracert’ and the IP address or website address eg. tracert http://www.hetzner.co.za or tracert 41.203.23.117
- Ensure to leave a space between the tracert command and the IP address or website address
The results will look similar to this:
Tracing route to hetzner.co.za [41.203.23.117] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms vuurmuur.hetzner.africa [192.168.0.254]
2 5 ms 4 ms 5 ms 10.255.53.1
3 8 ms 10 ms 4 ms 196.7.147.71
4 5 ms 5 ms 4 ms 196.30.77.74
5 5 ms 21 ms 7 ms 196.40.104.65
6 6 ms 6 ms 5 ms ge8-0-0.gw1.cpt1.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.176.33]
7 45 ms 44 ms 46 ms 196.30.1.21
8 45 ms 45 ms 46 ms vlan9.hr3.jnb6.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.156.136]
9 44 ms 42 ms 45 ms 196.30.213.108
10 43 ms 46 ms 45 ms 196.30.132.165
11 43 ms 43 ms 43 ms staging.hetzner.co.za [41.203.23.117]
Trace complete.
- There are 11 ‘hops’ with 3 time tests (probes) in each; reporting how long (in milliseconds i.e. ms) it took to get to that point and return.
- Each ‘hop’ shows the IP address of the router (a device used for routing internet traffic) and/or its name.
- If no response is received from a router, the milliseconds are replaced by an asterisk (*). This could mean that that specific hop has purposely been configured to not respond to traceroute ‘probes’.
- Run ‘Traceroute’ several times, as the first iteration usually reports artificially long ping times.
- Hops 1 through to 5 mainly show the responses on routes taken by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Hops 6 to 8 show the responses from the backbone provider (MTN Business). The remainder of the hops show the responses from Hetzner.
- When you interpret the results and are seeing response times that are greater than 1000 ms (one full second), or get asterisks you are almost certain to experience slowness or lag and disconnects.
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