Sometimes during troubleshooting we need to see the path that your connection is taking to reach the web server.

If this is the case, we may ask you do a traceroute and send us the results.

Traceroute on Windows

Click on the Windows start button and in the the search box type “cmd” to find/open the command prompt:

command prompt open

When the command prompt is open type “tracert domainname.com” for the website that you want to perform a traceroute to.

traceroute step 1

After you hit the Enter key, the traceroute will run, and you will see something like this:

traceroute step 2

This is a list of all the hops that your connection takes to connect to the web server. Pretty neat. As you can see, there can be a lot of network points that you travel through to connect to a web server.

To send this information to us, if we request it, copy and paste it into a text file or email message and send it to us at support@absolutemg.com.

To copy/paste, right click on the command prompt window and choose the “select all” option. Then use CTRL+C to copy and CTRL+V to paste into an email or text document.

traceroute step 3

Traceroute on Mac OSX

On Mac OSX you can use the Network Utilities app to perform a traceroute. It seems a little tricky to locate the Network Utilities on the various versions of OSX, so here’s what we recommend.

Open Finder, click on the Applications folder and then in the search box type “Network Utilities”:

traceroute mac step 1

See the Network Utility app? Double click on that to open it.

Once the Network Utilities app is open, click on the Traceroute tab, enter the domain name you want to perform a traceroute to, and click the Trace button.

traceroute mac step 2

You can copy/paste the results into an email or text file and send it to support@absolutemg.com.