Computer. Programming. TinyURL.com. Tools. Sitemaps. Learning by doing: Writing your own traceroute in 8 easy steps - System administration and software blog. Anyone who administers even a moderately sized network knows that when problems arise, diagnosing and fixing them can be extremely difficult.
They're usually non-deterministic and difficult to reproduce, and very similar symptoms (e.g. a slow or unreliable connection) can be caused by any number of problems — congestion, a broken router, a bad physical link, etc. One very useful weapon in a system administrator's arsenal for dealing with network issues is traceroute (or tracert, if you use Windows). This is a neat little program that will print out the path that packets take to get from the local machine to a destination — that is, the sequence of routers that the packets go through.
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