mtr…the love child of ping and traceroute

Just a quick note to tell you to check out mtr if you haven’t already.  It combines the features of ping and traceroute in kind of an interpreted mode that runs until you quit.  There are a few command line switches as well to make life easier for automation.  Here’s a generic example of it’s output going out to Google:

My traceroute  [v0.75]
centos.mydomain.com (0.0.0.0)             Mon Jun 29 10:10:25 2009
Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit
                                                                                            Packets              Pings
Host              Loss%   Snt  Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
1. 192.168.1.1    0.0%     6    0.3   0.4   0.3   0.6   0.1
2. 66.53.18.65    0.0%     6   37.7  21.2   7.4  37.7  12.8
3. ???

I’ve changed the IP addresses above to protect the innocent, but it should give you a general idea of what to expect.  For years as a network engineer I used “ping –t” to watch for downed gear to come back online.  This tool gives you that ability and much more as it keeps track of numerous interesting and useful statistics.