Working of Traceroute Tool

The working Traceroute Tool can be broken down into 7 different steps which are listed and described below:

1. Initialization: Traceroute begins by sending a packet to the destination with a Time-to-Live (TTL) set to 1.
2. Packet Transmission: The packet is sent to the destination. The first router encountered decrements the bto 0, discards the packet, and sends an ICMP Time Exceeded message back to the source.
3. First Set of Results: The source records the round-trip time for the first hop and the IP address of the first router. Another packet is sent with a TTL of 2.
4. Iterative Process: Steps 2 and 3 are repeated, increasing the TTL with each iteration. This reveals successive routers along the network path.
5. Destination Reached: When a packet reaches the destination, the destination sends an ICMP Echo Reply back to the source.
6. Recording Information: Round-trip time and IP addresses are recorded for each hop along the route.
7. Output Presentation: Traceroute compiles and displays the recorded information, presenting the route to the destination with associated round-trip times.

Prerequisites:

1. Linux Environment: This tutorial assumes you are working in a Linux environment. The provided instructions and script are tailored for Linux systems.
2. Terminal Access: You should have access to a terminal or command-line interface on your Linux system. Most Linux distributions provide this by default.
3. Python Installed: The provided script in the tutorial uses Python. Python is commonly pre-installed on many Linux distributions.

In Network information discovery, the traceroute tool is a fundamental utility in a Linux environment. Although the tool is already developed for the command line utility, we can still make our own Traceroute tool using Python language. We will explore the fundamentals of ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) and utilize Python’s socket programming. So in this article, we will see the detailed implementation of the Traceroute tool in Python Language.