I was working with someone on a project and I noticed they were using mtr
(My Trace Route) instead of traceroute
, is there some advantage to this? Why would they use that other tool instead?
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leeand00
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Since this is Ubuntu-oriented site I have made a comparison of similar tools available on this distribution.
From their respective MAN pages:
Traceroute
traceroute tracks the route packets taken from an IP network on their way to a given host.
Example Output (trimmed):
$ traceroute 1.1.1.1
traceroute to 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 0.265 ms 0.248 ms 0.239 ms
2 * * *
3 X-X-X-X.X.X.pl (X.X.X.X) 21.871 ms 22.061 ms 25.072 ms
(more data here)
10 one.one.one.one (1.1.1.1) 24.072 ms 22.439 ms 21.497 ms
MTR
mtr combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping programs in a single network diagnostic tool.
In short MTR does traceroute
continuously and presents it in nice formatted table.
Example output:
$ mtr 1.1.1.1 -c 5 --report
Start: 2019-08-09T15:13:28+0200
HOST: blackhole Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1.|-- 192.168.1.1 0.0% 5 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.2 0.0
2.|-- X-X-X-X.X.X 0.0% 5 9.7 9.0 8.4 9.7 0.5
3.|-- X-X-X-X.X.X 0.0% 5 9.6 8.6 6.2 9.8 1.5
(more data here)
10.|-- one.one.one.one 0.0% 5 12.8 13.4 10.7 18.9 3.3

Michal Przybylowicz
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I know. I made a comparison of the tools available on Ubuntu, since this is an Ubuntu-oriented website I assumed the OP made a mistake in the name. – Michal Przybylowicz Aug 09 '19 at 13:21
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tracert
in Ubuntu. – Pilot6 Aug 09 '19 at 13:16traceroute
, better? – leeand00 Aug 09 '19 at 14:15tracert
is not Ubuntu related. – Pilot6 Aug 09 '19 at 14:17