Network Troubleshooting using the TRACERT (TRACEROUTE) Command

hello and welcome to sake Tech so in this video I will talk about the trace RT command which is also known as the trace route command but in Windows 7 or any other windows you have to use it as trace or t now this is a powerful Network troubleshooting utility it is a route tracing diagnostic utility that determines the path it takes for a packet a data packet or an IP packet to travel from your computer to a destination so basically with Trace RT you can print the entire route it takes for you to contact google.com or yahoo.com or whitehouse.gov or any other destination that you are trying to trace all right so let's run the trace RT command so type in Trace RT and let's just do Google really quick www.google.com so basically what's going to happen is the command prompt is going to print complete list of the route we are going to take to reach google.com and I'm going to explain this to you once the trace is complete so let's press enter to start the trace and I'm gonna wait for the trace to complete and then analyze the results really quick okay so the trace is complete let's see what's going on here now anytime you go online to anywhere other than your own local area network which you guys usually think is you type in www.google.com and boom Google just shows up right what actually happens in the background is you travel through hundreds of routers before you reach your destination sometimes less than 100 but mostly uh it's it's a large number okay and the trace RT actually prints every single one of the routers that you hit on your way to your destination okay that's how the internet works the internet is a network of hundreds of thousands of millions of routers that you get routed through to reach a destination okay so let's take a look at what happened over here so what I did was I wanted to go to google.com Okay so it's saying here tracing route to www.google.com it gives you the IP address of google.com and it starts the route on the tracing right over here at number one so the first thing it hits is my own Wireless Broadband router in my home okay so this is my router that's the first router we hit the second rot rate is is a Verizon router so if you look over here it says Verizon blah blah blah.net so I do go through the ISP called Verizon so it is natural let it hit the Verizon router now the third router is again a Verizon router and then it goes through different routers until it finally reaches google.com but if you look at this total numbers over here the file number is number 14. so it took 14 routers for me to reach google.com and also I just want to let you know that uh this is also called 14 hops so if I say 14 routers it's the same as 14 hubs so it took me 14 hops to reach google.com and also wanted to let you know that there are some routers out there in the world that do not let you run a trace RT on them so if you look at number 13 the request was timed out either this router dropped the packet so it does not accept Trace RT packets or this router was not working so we were directed to the final router number 14. alrighty so sometimes the router does not work and sometimes it drops the packet it silently drops the packet doesn't tell you why you just have to make a guess over there but um so how can we use this as a diagnostic utility let's say you were going to a website let's say google.com is working for you right now that means you're going to see this whole Trace all the way now if google.com goes down okay or if your ISP goes down what's going to happen is at number two here in your isps router the trace is going to stop it's going to go no further than your Verizon ISP then you can call Verizon and you can tell them Hey listen I was trying to reach google.com which your routers are not routing the packages so I can go to google.com Okay let me run one one more Trace RT www dot Whitehouse .gov is it.gov yeah dot gov so we are going to be routed to the White House's website and this was fairly quickly so the first router is my own Wireless Broadband router just like on the top here the second one is the Verizon router just like the one up here and then it's going to get routed through a bunch of different routers until it finally reaches the destination so if you look over here we went through one two three four five six seven eight different routers to reach whitehouse.gov which makes sense because I live in PA and White House is done in Washington so it makes sense that I only took me eight routers to get to whitehouse.gov as in where Google took me 14 Hops and we know that Google is not in in in in this East Coast all right now that we have two Trace RTS over here let's uh look at a look at something over here that's interesting so tracing it's over here it says tracing route to www.google.com over a maximum of 30 hops okay at the bottom here it says tracing Route 2 whitehouse.gov over a maximum of 30 hops so what is this maximum of 30 hubs what that stands for is if you hit more than 30 routers to reach a destination the trace route command stops at the 30th hop okay so the maximum amount of hops you can trace by default is set to be 30 period and then um what you can do is you can use a parameter under the trace RT command to actually change the number of hops you want to travel so let me show you how to do that really quick okay so the the parameter that we're going to use is called minus H so you type in Trace RT you say minus H and then you define the maximum amount of hops you are willing to take you can put in 60 you can put in a hundred before the trace terminates let's do five and let's run this on the whitehouse.gov so I can show you how it's going to terminate after the fifth hop so www.wayhouse.gov press enter okay as you can see the trace is complete so on the first spot we took eight hops to reach whitehouse.gov on this one over here with the minus H parameter we Define the maximum hops before the trace RT terminates to be five so the trace was complete in five let's do one more so Trace RT minus H let's just do four well let's do three www.google.com so this should terminate on the third hub boom it's over okay so you can actually change this number this is just the default number of 30 hubs you can also go beyond 30 to 100 hubs alrighty all right so let me just clear the screen really quick CLS to clear the screen and type in one more command well not a command but a help tool so if you type in Trace RT and then do slash question mark you will get a list of all the parameters that you can use uh with the trace RT command and not all of them are that important but the one I showed you was important and you can check the others yourself so just remember with Trace RT is a diagnostic tool because it traces your packets okay so if you're trying to reach google.com which you can't reach it you are able to find where is the failure happening so if it's failing in the second hop that means your ISP has a problem if it is failing all the way in the middle somewhere you know it is not your ISP it is somebody else not much you can do about it but it is still in formation and then you can also gather some miscellaneous information I'll give you an example so let's do a Trace RT whitehouse.gov okay and what I'm going to do is I'm going to press enter and if you look at these names carefully there's some descriptive qualities to these names so as I come closer to White House which is as you come closer to number eight the last hop you start seeing this thing called a Kamai Technologies okay so basically you can deduce by looking at this that the White House actually has business dealings with Akamai Technologies now when you go to Google and you type in Akamai Technologies it comes to be that Akamai Technologies is an ISP that actually does serve White House okay to host some of their files or videos or whatever but I'm just letting you know that you by looking around here at these uh names you can find out information such as this okay maybe the information in the middle here is not that important it's just as Verizon but as you come closer to whitehouse.gov you start to see a Kamai Technologies now obviously that is not any kind of um diagnostic tool it's just seems to be some interesting detective work all right but mainly we want to use Trace RT for Diagnostics all right so that brings us to the end of this video uh go ahead and subscribe to my channel for more videos to come uh give me a thumbs up if you liked this video and also you can go ahead and connect with me socially on Google Plus Facebook and Twitter for which all the links are in the description below thank you again and I'll see you the next time and if you have any questions comments concerns just throw them down in the comments section below

Channel: sakitech

Views: 55,736

Keywords: network troubleshooting, tracert, traceroute, command, command prompt

Id: x_3dWSQkHB8

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Sat May 10 2014