The journey of an internet packet: exploring networks with traceroute

The internet is a complex network of routers, switches, and computers, and when we try to connect to a server, our packets go through many routers before reaching the destination. If one of these routers is misconfigured or down, the packet can be dropped, and we can’t reach the destination.

In this post, we will see how traceroute works, and how it can help us diagnose network problems.
↫ Sebastian Marines

I’m sure most of us have used traceroute at some point in our lives, but I never once wondered how,, exactly, it works. The internet – and networking in general – always feels like arcane magic to me, not truly understandable by mere mortals without years of dedicated study and practice. Even something as simple as managing a home router can be a confusing nightmare of abbreviations, terminology, and backwards compatibility hacks, so you can imagine how complex it gets when you leave your home network and start sending packets out into the wider world.

This post does a great job of explaining exactly how traceroute works without overloading you with stuff you don’t need to know.