The
Internet is a large and complex
aggregation of network hardware,
connected together by
gateways.
Tracking the route one's
packets follow (or finding the miscreant
gateway that's discarding your packets)
can be difficult. Traceroute utilizes
the
IP protocol '
time to live' field
and attempts to elicit an
ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED response from each
gateway along the path to some
host.
The only mandatory parameter is the
destination host name or IP number.