<P> The traceroute manual page states that the original traceroute program was written by Van Jacobson in 1987 from a suggestion by Steve Deering, with particularly cogent suggestions or fixes from C. Philip Wood, Tim Seaver and Ken Adelman . The author of the ping program, Mike Muuss, states on his website that traceroute was written using kernel ICMP support that he had earlier coded to enable raw ICMP sockets when he first wrote the ping program . </P> <P> Traceroute limitations are well known and should be taken into account when using the tool . For example, traceroute does not discover paths at the router level, but at the interface level . Another limitation appears when routers do not respond to probes or when routers have a limit for ICMP responses . In the presence of traffic load balancing, traceroute may indicate a path that does not actually exist, to minimize this problem there is a traceroute modification called Paris - traceroute, which maintains the flow identifier of the probes to avoid load balancing . </P>

What information does tracert provide that ping does not