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Using the Traceroute Command to Track Server Requests

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Hey guys, we’re about to talk about the traceroute command and what it does why you use it, but first we need to install that program. So, just come along with me run “sudo apt-get install traceroute” and it will fetch that from the repositories and install it for us, and when it’s done we can run the command. So, run “traceroute” all one word and then the domain that you want to trace the route to, and it’s gonna spit out every server that the request jumps from and to in order to get to Google’s server. When you see “* * *” it means the request has times out on that server so it’s gonna try another one. There we go. Let me make this bigger so it might be easier to read here, alright. So, we can basically trace what servers we are communicating with in order to gets to google.com. So, when I when I type in google.com into my browser, it doesn’t just go from my router, the request doesn’t get sent automatically right to Google servers, what happens is there’s a lot of intermediary servers in between the two including your ISP, the DNS servers, and then other servers that need to be hopped to order to get to Google, So, this is what we’re seeing here. The first request, this is the IP address of my router, this is the length of time that it took to get there. What happens then is this address is where this goes and you can see each address as we go down gets a bit different because we’re going to a different part of the world. And the host name will show if it’s available too with the IP address in brackets, so we can see this my ISP and this is one of their servers that my request has to hop from in order to get the information required to get to google.com. So, I’m gonna try it with my own server here so I’m just gonna type “traceroute pointybracket.net” and we can see that is accessing different servers in order to get to where it needs to be. So, in here we can see two interesting things, first of all my internet service provider, and second of all my virtual private server provider, and I’m not going to point those out, but we can see that and then we can see also everything in between that holds information about the route that our request needs to take in order to get to that server. So, that’s how to use trace route and that’s why you would is just kind of to you know trace the route of your request to different servers. So, thank you guys for watching this video and I will see you guys again soon.