I found Traceroute isn’t real, or: Whoops! Everyone Was Wrong Forever (discussed on Hacker News) a fascinating read, as someone whose knowledge of computer networking is admittedly relatively weak:
Traceroute is a filthy hack.
I can’t find any proper history of the tool, but my impression and my assumption is that it is simply a behavior that someone noticed was possible. Engineers did not get together and design a system for this; some people just realized that it was a side effect of other network behavior not intended to accomplish this goal.
In other words, it’s an exploit, and that is really the best way to describe both how it works, and why it’s a bad idea.
The comments on the Hacker News thread however provide a dissenting opinion. I liked this one:
This is a nice rant, but telling people not to use this tool because it has many flaws isn’t very helpful. AFAIK, there’s not a better tool out there to use; the alternative is hoping things will get better by magic and the passage of time (which, to be fair, is somewhat effective; but not ideal if you’ve got things to do)
Yes, traceroute doesn’t address it’s hard to get in touch with someone who can help. Sure, anything to do with ICMP probably has to deal with rate limiting (and the two people are tracing so the packet loss is 50% effect is real, and frustrating). But when I’ve had network problems and a contact who is willing to help, they really want a traceroute or mtr to help narrow down where the problem is.