What happened to traceroute -I?

I just upgraded a machine to Fedora 5. Apparently, this has a traceroute
that is ignorant of -I. It uses only high udp packets, which is next to
useless in a WAN environment (where we can expect these to be filtered).

What is supposed to replace traceroute -I? Should I switch to
tcptraceroute, perhaps? Does it support ICMP?

Thanks...

Andrew

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:56:53 -0400, Andrew Gideon wrote:
>
>I just upgraded a machine to Fedora 5. Apparently, this has a traceroute
>that is ignorant of -I. It uses only high udp packets, which is next to
>useless in a WAN environment (where we can expect these to be filtered).
>
>What is supposed to replace traceroute -I? Should I switch to
>tcptraceroute, perhaps? Does it support ICMP?

Have you tried mtr? Very nice tool and it uses ICMP exclusively.

--
Maurice

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:19:44 +0000, Maurice Janssen wrote:

> Have you tried mtr?

Not until now; I'd not previously heard of it.

> Very nice tool and it uses ICMP exclusively.

It does seem nice. However, it appears to be usable by root only.

- Andrew

"Andrew Gideon" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news(E-Mail Removed)

>> Have you tried mtr?
>
> Not until now; I'd not previously heard of it.
>
>> Very nice tool and it uses ICMP exclusively.
>
> It does seem nice. However, it appears to be usable by root only.

Here's something guaranteed to draw flames ... chmod u+s.

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.networking, in
article <(E-Mail Removed)>, Andrew Gideon wrote:

>I just upgraded a machine to Fedora 5. Apparently, this has a traceroute
>that is ignorant of -I. It uses only high udp packets, which is next to
>useless in a WAN environment (where we can expect these to be filtered).

[compton ~]$ zgrep traceroute rpms.fc* | awk '{print $1" "$NF}'
rpms.fc2.gz: traceroute-1.4a12-21.1.i386.rpm
rpms.fc3.gz: traceroute-1.4a12-24.i386.rpm
rpms.fc4.gz: traceroute-1.4a12-26.i386.rpm
rpms.fc5.gz: traceroute-1.0.4-1.2.i386.rpm
[compton ~]$

Crap! Wonder why they did that? What does 'rpm -qi traceroute' tell you?
I know that SuSE started using the re-write from Olaf Kirch who was at
Caldera, and that version uses -I instead of -i for the interface selection.
Supposedly, the re-write was done to "improve security" as well as add IPv6
capability. The FC5 RELEASE-NOTES file doesn't mention this.

As far as blocking UDP, I find that ICMP echo is much more likely to be
blocked or ignored.

>What is supposed to replace traceroute -I?

[compton ~]$ whatis hping2 mtr
hping2 (8) - send (almost) arbitrary TCP/IP packets to network hosts
mtr (8) - a network diagnostic tool
[compton ~]$

or grab the traceroute-1.4a12 source (it's a 75k tarball dated mid-December
2000). There are actually several other tools that might be useful. The
author of traceroute (Van Jacobson of LBL's Network Research Group) had
started on 'pathchar' which is fairly close to 'mtr' but work on it has
apparently been abandoned.

>Should I switch to tcptraceroute, perhaps? Does it support ICMP?

A far more useful application. No, it only supports TCP, which is much
more likely to pass through firewalls, and is also useful in exposing
ISP filtering (example - ISP blocks 25 outbound to control windoze zombie
spam). Don't forget that nearly all information on the Internet uses TCP,
not ICMP or UDP.

Old guy