Tracert

So, now you know that all machines that are on a network need to have an IP address. I live in Denver, Colorado, and one of my best friends, Ryan, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When I send him a message, it does not travel from my house through the wires directly to his house. It goes through “hops” (and not the beer kind, unfortunately for him). These hops are the routers between us.

Tracert is a cool diagnostic utility. It will determine the route the message takes from Denver to Albuquerque by using ICMP echo packets sent to the destination. You've seen ICMP in action before—with the ping command.

ICMP is one of the Internet's original protocols used by network devices to send operational information or error messages. ICMP is not usually used to send data between computers, with the exception of ping and traceroute. It is used to report errors in the processing of datagrams.

Each router along the path subtracts the packets TTL value by 1...