It’s amazing how many utilities we have at our disposal specially in unix based systems.

I was on a training a couple of weeks ago and out of nowhere the instructor fired up this utility which basically combines ping and traceroute in realtime.

That application is called ‘My Traceroute’ or simply MTR. Read the rest

Here is a typical example of a ping command:

Ping Example

Now here we have the typical traceroute command (click the image to make it bigger):

Traceroute Example

The key difference between both tools is that ping occurs in realtime, sending echo requests each second. Traceroute on the other hand once it gets to its destination its done.

Here is how ‘mtr’ command looks like (click the image to make it bigger):

MTR Example

As you can see you can get more information out of it, in realtime. For instance you can determine at exactly which hop you are losing packets, or which of the hops is the slower one.

Getting mtr installed is very easy:

For Debian based Linux (like Ubuntu) distributions:

apt-get install mtr

For RedHat based Linux distributions:

yum install mtr

If you need to compile mtr on any Unix based system:

Download the latest version from ftp://ftp.bitwizard.nl/mtr/

After uncompressing the tar file:

cd into the uncompressed folder (mtr-0.80 for example)

Mac OS X users need to run the following before running the configure command (you also need Xcode installed):

export LIBS=’-lm -ltermcap -lresolv’

./configure –prefix=/usr

if you are a sudoer:

sudo make

sudo make install

if you are root:

make

make install

Now you are ready: mtr hostname|Ipaddress


There seems to be a Windows binary version at: http://winmtr.sourceforge.net/ ; but I haven’t tried it though.


mtr is distributed under the GNU General Public License.


Author: Daniel Ruiz

Adcap Network Systems

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