Traceroute

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An extensively used internet operations tool, introduced in 1993, [1] traceroute attempts to determine the hop-by-hop routing connectivity between two Internet addreses, or shed light on where connectivity fails. It is often used as a way to estimate network performance, but the user must know its limitations for this purpose, and how to interpret sometimes subtle anomalies.[2] For example, the sum of hop-by-hop delays between two points may differ from the delay reported by the ping tool, because both ping and traceroute use different protocols, and router designers handle these differently.

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