Trace Route Instructions
The Internet is a collaborative entity. When you are looking at a web site, the information on your screen has been transmitted through several computers to reach you; from the originating web server it must travel over several "hops" (as many as ten or more) to finally reach your computer. Each hop is a connection owned by a different company, university, or government. So in order for you to see your web site on your computer, four or five companies’ equipment may be involved. Because of this, there are three important things to keep in mind:
- Any break in the chain of computers between you and your web server can cause delays. This is not necessarily the fault of NeoReality or our hosting providers. Unfortunately we cannot control every computer between the web server and the final destination.
- The fact that you are having problems viewing a web site does not mean everyone is. If you connect through a different Internet service provider you may find that the site suddenly begins to work again. This is because now the data is traveling along a different "path". (On the flip side, if the two providers use the same backbone, the problem will persist.)
- Many delays on the Internet are transient in nature and will go away in a few minutes. Sometimes the best remedy to a problem is just to wait for five minutes and try again.
We can come a step closer to determining where a problem exists if you run a "trace route" to list all of the hops between your computer and the web server. Here are the step-by-step instructions to run the program. This should take less than five minutes to complete.
Instructions for Microsoft Windows
- Connect to the Internet as you do normally.
- Open an MS-DOS window. This can usually be accomplished by clicking on the Start button, then on Programs or All Programs, then on MS-DOS Prompt or Command Line. A black window will appear that you can type into.
- Type cd \windows\desktop and press Enter.
- Type tracert www.neoreality.com > tr1.txt and press Enter, except replace the address www.neoreality.com with your own web site domain. This will run the trace route program. You will be instructed below do this twice more for redundancy, except using a different digit in the last filename.
- Wait for the program to finish. You should see a prompt again (should be something that looks like C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\>). If you see a message that says Bad command or file name then stop and contact NeoReality for further assistance.
- Type tracert www.neoreality.com > tr2.txt and press Enter, again replacing www.neoreality.com with your own web site domain.
- Wait for the program to finish. You will see a prompt again as before.
- Type tracert www.neoreality.com > tr3.txt and press Enter, again replacing www.neoreality.com with your own web site domain.
- Wait for the program to finish. You will see a prompt again as before.
- Type exit and press Enter. The MS-DOS window should close. If instead the window title changes to say Finished then you should click the X in the top bar of the window to close it.
- Look at your Windows desktop (i.e. minimize any windows you have
opened - you can do this quickly by holding down the Windows key and
pressing the letter M on your keyboard) and find the three icons
called tr1, tr2, and tr3 (or they may
appear as tr1.txt, tr2.txt, and
tr3.txt). They probably will look like little notepads. You
must now send those three files to NeoReality. Please choose one
method:
- Because these are small text files, you may simply attach them to an email sent to support@neoreality.com.
- You may print and fax to +1 239-561-5812.
- You may upload to us using our Upload page.
- After you have provided us the files, you may delete them from your desktop. To do this, drag them to your Recycle Bin, or right-click on each one and choose Delete.
Instructions for Linux
- Please login to a console as user root. This varies from distribution to distribution so please refer to your documentation for exact instructions. We give instructions here that should work on the Linux systems that we install for our clients.
- Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to activate the first virtual console.
- You should see Login:. Type root and press Enter.
- You should see Password:. Type your root password. The keys you press will not make anything appear on the screen for security reasons.
- Type this command all on one line: for i in 1 2 3; do /usr/sbin/traceroute www.neoreality.com 2>&1; echo; sleep 5; done ¦ mail support@neoreality.com -s traceroutes Replace www.neoreality.com with the web site in question. The character after the word "done" is a pipe (a.k.a. vertical bar) and is usually found above Enter on US keyboards (you must press Shift).
- Wait for the command to finish. You should see a prompt again (should be something that looks like [root@something root]# where "something" is some word that represents that computer). If you see any error messages before this line, please stop and contact NeoReality for further assistance.
- Type exit and press Enter.