How to run a TCP Traceroute

Products

• Email Security.cloud

Issue/Introduction

You have been asked by a member of the support team to run a TCP Traceroute or you are looking for a tool to troubleshoot connection issues between the Symantec Email Security.cloud servers and your own.

Resolution

Introduction

This guide will assist with configuring your environment to run a TCP Traceroute connection test. Though often misunderstood to mean the same thing, a Traceroute and a TCP Traceroute are fundamentally different operations. The main difference of that operation being that Traceroute uses ICMP packets while TCP Traceroute uses TCP packets. By using the TCP Traceroute tool we can better reproduce the connection being made by your mail server.

 

Windows

Prerequisites 

1. Download and install the WinPcap library.
2. Download the latest release of tracetcp. Extract the archive.
3. (Optional) Copy tracetcp.exe to your System32 folder. 

Process

Complete the following steps to run the TCP traceroute

1. Open your choice of Powershell or Command Prompt
2. If you did not copy tracetcp.exe to your System32 folder, navigate to the tracetcp.exe location
3. Run the following command:
   ​tracetcp.exe clusterXout.xx.messagelabs.com:25

Where clusterXout.xx.messagelabs.com is your assigned cluster information.

You should receive a similar output to the following:

Please provide the above information to the support team member who is working on your case, if applicable.

 

Linux

Prerequisites

Some Linux distributions may already have the tcptraceroute tool installed. You can test this by running "command -v tcptraceroute" or executing the command listed in the process.

 

To install the tcptraceroute command on a Debian-based distro using APT

apt-get update

apt-get install traceroute

 

To install the tcptraceroute command on a RedHat based distro using YUM

yum update

yum install traceroute

 

Process

Complete the following steps to run the TCP traceroute:

1. Open your terminal or ssh shell
2. Run the following command:
   tcptraceroute clusterXout.xx.messagelabs.com 25

Where clusterXout.xx.messagelabs.com is your assigned cluster information.

You should receive a similar output to the following:

Please provide the above information to the support team member who is working on your case, if applicable.