To run a Traceroute from your computer to a web site on the Internet, or to another device, perform the following steps based on your computer's operating system.
In Windows:
- Open the command prompt:
From the Start menu, select Run. (NOTE: Windows® 8 users need to right-click the Start menu.) - In the search field, type
cmd
, and then pressEnter
or clickOk
. - At the command prompt, enter
tracert domainname
, wheredomainname
is the name of the web site you are trying to access. You can also enter an IP address in place of the domain name.
In Mac OS X:
- Open the Nework Utility:
In Finder, selectApplications
, then expand the Utilities folder and openNetwork Utility
by double-clicking on it. - In the Network Utility window, select the
Traceroute
tab and enter thedomain name
orIP address
into the search box and click onTrace
.
You should see output to your screen similar to the following:
traceroute to domainname.com (207.170.215.70), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 esnet3-wwweng9 (198.129.252.193) 0.328 ms 0.201 ms 0.234 ms
2 lblmr2-esnetrt3 (198.129.77.45) 0.229 ms 0.217 ms 0.238 ms
3 slacmr2-ip-lblmr2 (134.55.219.10) 26.352 ms 1.340 ms 1.237 ms
4 sunnsdn2-ip-slacmr2 (134.55.217.2) 1.735 ms 1.719 ms 1.612 ms
5 sunncr1-sunnsdn2 (134.55.209.98) 1.734 ms 1.718 ms 1.740 ms
6 paixpart1-sunncr1 (134.55.218.133) 2.483 ms 2.466 ms 2.362 ms
7 ***
8 domainname.com (207.170.215.70) 30.747 ms 30.684 ms 30.971 ms
Trace Complete.
In many cases, a network technician will need to analyze the traceroute further. To send the data for further analysis, do the following:
In Windows:
- After the trace route has completed, right-click anywhere on this window and click
Select All
. - Press
Enter
and the information will be copied to the Windows clipboard. - Paste this into a text document (Notepad, WordPad, etc.).
- Email or send the text file to the network technician.
In Mac OS X:
Highlight
andcopy
the traceroute results and thenpaste
it into an email message for sending to the network technician or paste it into an online support ticket.