WinTraceroute

Quick link to the Installation Instructions for the impatient

Provides a mostly *NIX-traceroute-like -- but very basic -- tracert/traceroute UDP/IPv4 alternative built on scapy. Available for Windows, Linux, Mac and everything else that runs Python3 and Scapy.

The motivation for this small project was the differences in behaviour between Linux' traceroute and Windows' tracert commands, in particular that the Windows variant uses ICMP and therefore does not allow for a custom package size in the same way the Linux variant does. I just wanted to bring a basic version of the Linux-traceroute to Windows, while also having this program do just the same on any other platform.

This package is meant to be used via the integrated CLI, but the traceroute.py module can be used to capture Scapy's results in lists, so that it can technically be called from Python code.

Usage

$ wintraceroute
usage: traceroute [-h] [-m MAXTTL] [-f MINTTL] [-q FLEETSIZE] [-w TIMEOUT] [-p PORT] [-s SOURCE] [-M {UDP,ICMP}] host [packet_length]

Note: This program often requires higher privileges to obtain access to the network adapter because of Scapy under it. If you encounter such problems:

• on Windows, run as administrator
• on Linux/Mac, run with sudo

Example run (I redacted some IPs with #s):

$ sudo wintraceroute 8.8.8.8

  1        8.238           4.052           3.911        ###.###.###.###
  2       12.462                          12.313        62.155.###.###
                            *                            (no response)
  3       21.610          19.516          18.816        217.5.118.26
  4       19.093          19.010                        87.128.238.134
                                          20.092        87.128.238.132
  5         *               *               *            (no response)
  6       21.839          21.319          27.482        8.8.8.8

Destination '8.8.8.8' reached  in RTT min. 21.319, avg. 23.547, max. 27.482 ms  via 6 hops.

See also the help page, available using the -h or --help option.

Installation and/or Download

The recommended way of installing this tool on any platform is via pip, but there are also standalone binaries available for Windows and can be built for Linux.

❗ You need to have a Pcap provider installed, for example libpcap on Linux or Npcap on Windows. If you have Wireshark installed, for example, you almost certainly already have that.

Via pip / from PyPI

If you are running Python 3.9 or above, you may want to install WinTraceroute via pip. This also tries to register the wintraceroute command in your system.

Just run pip install WinTraceroute in your local Python environment and make sure you have a Pcap provider installed, for example libpcap on Linux or Npcap on Windows.

ℹ️ Tip for Linux/Debian users: If available, use the --system pip option to install for all users, so that you don't have to install using sudo.

❗ If you have problems with this strategy of installation, consider loading / building a binary for your respective operating system -- see below.

You may also want to head over to this project on PyPI.

Windows Binary

These binaries are just plain and simple unsigned builds using PyInstaller. They don't require a local Python environment, so this is the easiest way of running this program if you're on Windows and just want a simple .exe file.

Make sure you have Npcap or an alternative installed.

You can download it from the Assets section in the latest Release.

Linux Binary

You can build a standalone binary from source, if you like:

• Install all necessary dependencies (if you don't have them already):
  • Python 3.9 or newer
  • make
  • libpcap
• Download/clone the source code and change into the directory.
• Install all necessary python dependies in your Python environment:
  • pip install -r requirements.txt
• Run make build_lnx
  • (Note that the clean target might ask for your sudo password to delete everything from the dist/ directory. If you're not okay with that, run the commands from the makefile yourself or consider installing via pip instead.)
• You can find the output binary in the _dist_out/lnx/ directory.

run directly from source

You can also just run this program on your Python 3.9 or newer environment from source by cloning/downloading the code, entering the directory and then running

• <your_python> -m traceroute
  • ... where for example <your_python> == python3.
  • ℹ️ Note: traceroute is the "traceroute" directory in the source, not traceroute.py within that directory!
  • ❗ Make sure you type traceroute, not for example traceroute/ with a slash.

License

This project is published under the GPL v2.0 license.

Scapy, which this project uses, is published under the GPL v2.0 license, at the time of writing.