Make your traceroute tool quick

Traceroute is the second most popular network diagnostic tool after ping. Yet most of the people do not know how to use it properly.

There is one simple trick – disable domain name resolution for all intermediate hops. In most cases you don’t really care because you deal with IP addresses. Each time traceroute gets a reply – it tries to make reverse DNS lookup.

Here is how to do this,

Cisco IOS CLI:

traceroute 1.2.3.4 numeric

MS Windows:

tracert -d 1.2.3.4

UNIX:

traceroute -n 1.2.3.4

This tool is used too often to waste seconds every time you need to make a trace.