mtr is an small utility which combines both the functionality of traceroute and ping, for Linux and BSD.
There are always occasions where you’ve wanted to traceroute to a host, possibly due to connectivity issues, and you need to diagnose where the problem lies. Most operating systems offer basic traceroute and ping utilities, but what if you need something a little bit better? mtr is the answer..
mtr allows you to start a ping/traceroute to a host, and it constantly updates on screen with the latest ping times to every hop along the way, giving you a great view to exactly what’s going on.
Traditional traceroute, for example, only runs once through the route, and gives a view of that moment in time – with the constant updates in mtr, you don’t have this limitation. And, with mtr‘s ping functionality inbuilt to the main view, no longer do you need to run multiple command prompts/terminals to see what’s going on.
So if you use Linux or BSD, and you find yourself regularly testing various routing issues, ping times, or just general network diagnosis, give mtr a try.
For packages/installation, please refer to the inbuilt packaging system of your operating system (Debian/Ubuntu users, mtr is available from the standard repositories). If mtr is not available as a package, you can download the source (GPL) from here: http://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/
