I am sure most of you all familiar with PING, the command that is used to see if the remote computer or destination is responding or not. However there are times when PING works but then the websites is like a roller coaster, for a minute you can access and the other you can’t. This is when traceroute comes to play. I don’t want to get too technical on how traceroute works but the simpler way to explain it is to check the route path and see how your ISP connects you to the destination address. One example is when you and your friend, both located in the same country, playing the same game on the same server but the huge difference in the latency / ping. There is just no way to lower your ping because of the way your ISP routes you to the server.
Although the DDoS attack on this website has completely stopped but some users are still experiencing intermittent down time or slowness. I’ve submitted a ticket to Staminus and they advised that the first step to check on the problem is to traceroute Staminus.net, Google DNS 8.8.8.8, Verizon DNS 4.2.2.1, one of Staminus’ IP 72.20.20.20 and raymond.cc. For some weird reason when I ran the command tracert raymond.cc at command prompt, it “Request timed out” for all 30 hops.
This is because our clever ISP TM NET has blocked all ICMP and UDP tracert.
There are websites such as Network-Tools.com that provides free traceroute service but if you’re having connection problems to a website, traceroute should always be done from your computer to the destination instead of using online service. One way to continue using tracert is to use TCP traceroute which can be done with PingPlotter.
Although PingPlotter is a shareware that cost $24.95 for a standard license and $199.95 for Professional license, you can download the older version which is absolutely free. Simply download from the link at the end of this article, install it and run it. Type in the address to trace and click the big Trace button at the bottom.
Now I am seeing a 100% packet loss on hop 13, 14 and 15 on Staminus’ side which means they might have some misconfiguration on their routers. All I need to do now is click on File at the menubar, select Save Image and send it to Staminus support. The Professional version of PingPlotter is even better because it shows jitter and also the use of tabs to trace multiple targets on a single instances for easier comparison.