TRACEROUTE

There were some undersea cables cut some days back and reports claimed places like Dubai and some other middle east were out of internet service .

So how to tell if the country u looking for is still online or not ?

It’s very simple . Run a Traceroute.

This simple network utility traces the hops internet packets take as they work their way across the internet towards your destination. It also measures how much time the journey from point A to point B takes, both in total and for each hop between nodes.

If your packets reach their intended destination then you'll know tat ur destination is up .

Right .. Let’s see how that works now …

Step 1: Find a Test Server

To do a proper traceroute, you need to pick a server that's actually in the destination country.However, there's no guarantee that any particular site is hosted by a server in the country its domain name indicates. Corporations especially tend to have servers spread out over several countries. Official government sites are almost always a sure thing that s hosted inside the country.

Step 2: Trace It!

1. Click on the Start button and choose Run.

2. In the text box, type cmd. This will bring up a command line prompt.

3. Type tracert hostname, where "hostname" is the web address of the server you want to test.

You can also use an IP address by typing tracert x.x.x.x, where the "x.x.x.x" is replaced by the IP address of the server.

4. Now u can watch the packets fly across the nodes .

Step 3: Analyze the Result

As your packets travel from point A to point B, you'll see each hop appear on its own line. Traceroute should display the address and name of each server or router along the way and the amount of time (measured in milliseconds) the packets take to travel between your desktop and that particular node. Eventually, you'll see your packets reach their destination. Here's an example of some raw traceroute data:

All Right ! ! U ve got the result . It may look like somethinhg above which I got while trying .

But how to interpret the results …

The times displayed are 3 pings from your desktop directly to that node, not the time its taking between the previous node and the current one

Asterisks (* * *) indicate a timeout. If you see a line with just asterisks on it, that means that the hop between nodes took longer than 200ms. Several lines of timeouts mean the packets are being held up in infinite loops or lost somewhere along the way.

• Note some points on the traceroute will show a timeout because administrators have restricted pings, and this may not necessarily indicate a fail point.

Ur ping test is successful if u get a ping reply packet from the destination u wanted to test.