Traceroute
- Date
- 1987 · confidence high
- Place
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States
- Credited to
- Van Jacobson, from a suggestion by Steve Deering
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
Jacobson wrote traceroute, a utility that reveals the path packets take across the Internet and the delay at each hop, building on the raw ICMP support Mike Muuss had earlier coded for the ping command.
Guy Almes and Matt Mathis developed the same idea in parallel; the exact split of credit among the three is not entirely clear.
What it led to
- Standard IP network diagnostic tool
- Basis for modern route-tracing tools (mtr, tracepath)