THE JOURNEY OF AN INTERNET PACKET: EXPLORING NETWORKS WITH TRACEROUTE

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

This article explains how traceroute works and how it can be used to diagnose network problems. It first explains the journey of an internet packet and how it traverses multiple routers before reaching its destination. It then introduces traceroute, which uses the Time To Live (TTL) field in IP headers to trace the path a packet takes. Traceroute identifies each router along the path by sending ICMP packets with increasing TTL values and listening for Time Exceeded Messages.