What do the numbers reported by the Windows TraceRt Mean

Question

I need to create a trace route as part of a .NET appliation to support trouble shooting. I have figured out how to use the .NET Ping class to do the tracing. What I do not understand is what the numbers reported by the command line utility are. This is somewhat censored results of a "tracert yahoo.com" from the Windows command line:

Tracing route to yahoo.com [206.190.60.37] over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms xx.xx.xx.xx

2 7 ms <1 ms <1 ms yy.yy.yy.yy

3 42 ms 37 ms 41 ms zz.zz.zz.zz

4 38 ms 37 ms 37 ms aa.aa.aa.aa

5 36 ms 36 ms 36 ms bb.bb.bb.bb

6 42 ms 41 ms 41 ms cc.cc.cc.cc

--- more lines deleted ---

The first column is the index and the next three columns are times in milliseconds. I have searched the web for an explanation and have come up dry. I thought that they might be min, average, and max numbers but line 2 would seem to counter that idea.

Jon Stonecash

Answer 1

If I remember right, tracert does three pings (actually not pings to the device, but effectively the same) to each device along the route and the the three times are just three different ping times to each device. For example, if you find a device in the list with one or more timeouts, that device is probably overloaded and causing the problems.

Answer 2

I looked at Wikipedia for this one - three packets are sent, the milliseconds reported are for each packet.

Answer 3

Tracert sends sets of pings to the destination. The first set has a time-to-live (TTL) of one. The TTL setting of one causes the first router to send an error message back to your computer. Your computer performs a DNS lookup of the IP address, and then displays the router's host name. The program then increments the TTL and sends another set of pings to retrieve the next router's information. This process is repeated until the end point is reached.

The first column is the number of hops to the destination (maximum of 30). The next three columns are the amounts of time to receive the responses. The right-most column shows the router information along the path.