On the internet, before the data reaches its final destination, it goes through several routers and a hop occurs when an incoming packet is forwarded to the next router. Data packets pass through bridges, routers, and gateways as they travel between source and destination. Hop: A hop is one portion of the path between source and destination. TTL: The time-to-live value, also known as the hop limit, is a mechanism that limits the lifespan or lifetime of data in a computer or network. It uses the ICMP error-reporting messages –Destination Unreachable and Time exceeded. Traceroute sends a UDP packet to the destination by taking benefit of ICMP’s messages. It traces the path of a packet from the source machine to an Internet host such as by calculating the average time taken each hop.

Traceroute or Tracert: It is a CUI based computer network diagnostic tools used in UNIX and Windows-like system respectively. In this Post, we are going to discuss working with traceroute using UDP/ICMP/TCP packets with the help of Wireshark.

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