DOS Command for tracing hops to a website?

High.. I heard there is a DOS command that comes with Windows that lets you type the command followed by either a web site or an IP and it tells you each hop it takes and how long in ms too... I even remember seeing it on SreenSavers, but their search function isn't too useful... (looked in Show Notes too.)

Does anyone know of this?

tracert.exe

It is ``tracert''. But don't put too much weight behind the times it gives you. There are a load of reasons why those numbers are somewhat bogus. The path should be more-or-less accurate, though. Also keep in mind that what's shown will be your path to the server. Its path back to you might be the same, or it might be totally different.

Thats right, the numbers don't always represent the truth. Some routers consider ping packets low priority and thus take longer to respond to them. Neotrace does a better job of this.

Sean

I second the comment on NeoTrace. It's a nice trace tool with some decent visuals (versus the text output of tracert).

The thing is that the response will always be ICMP (either Time Expired, Destination Unreachable, or Echo Reply), and routers will often consider those low priority as well, even if the original packet was not ICMP, so it's pretty much all bogus. BTW, most Unix traceroutes use high-numbered UDP packets to probe. Windows's tracert uses ICMP Echo Requests. There's also an ICMP Traceroute type, but I don't think I've ever seen that implemented.