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The program used to determine the round-trip delay between a workstation and a destination address is: (A) Tracert (B) Traceroute (C) Ping (D) Pop

My attempt:

When I googled it:

Traceroute is a utility that records the route (the specific gateway computers at each hop) through the Internet between your computer and a specified destination computer. It also calculates and displays the amount of time each hop took.

The tracert command is a Command Prompt command that's used to show several details about the path that a packet takes from the computer or device you're on to whatever destination you specify. You might also sometimes see the tracert command referred to as the trace route command or traceroute command.

It seems to me both can.

What is difference between them, can you explain, please?

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4 Answers 4

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  • Ping command, ping [1],[2], is the basic tool that sends a package to the destination and waits for the answer. In the output it shows the delays ( min/avg/max/mdev ). You can ping different ports too. You can ping different port too with other programs (see below). Among the many options you can select -p to specify the packet you send, useful for diagnosing data-dependent problems in a network.

  • Tracert and traceroute give you for each node between origin and destination the delay time. Some servers reserve a different amount of bandwidth to different services (udp,http...) so testing different ports (-p option udp,tcp,icmp...) gives different info.
    It is useful to understand where you spend more time. It is useful when you can change your routing to avoid those bottlenecks. It is slower than ping because will try, as said, to ask to each node between origin and destination.

  • For what I know pop is a protocol for email and it is possible there is a set of command to test the speed of this service too...

  • To ping a specific port (it is not really pinging) you can use tools as tcping [3] or tcpping [4].

    A common way to measure network latency to a remote host is by using ping utility which uses ICMP echo request and reply packets. In some cases, however, ICMP traffic is blocked by firewalls, which renders ping utility useless with hosts behind restrictive firewalls. In such case, you will need to rely on layer-3 measurement tools that use TCP/UDP packets since these layer-3 packets are more likely to bypass common firewall rules.

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  • 3
    You can't ping specific ports but you can use other tools to check if a port is being answered on (i.e. nmap).
    – dotancohen
    Sep 15, 2016 at 10:34
  • Ping has a constant TTL value during one run, whilst tracer(ou)t(e) must increase the TTL while running for finding the hops. Both, Ping and Traceroute use ICMP, and TTL is a property of ICMP. Details in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Control_Message_Protocol
    – rexkogitans
    Sep 15, 2016 at 14:05
  • @dotancohen Perfectly right to ping other ports you need other program as one of the version of tcpping, tcping... based on a different protocol to obtain similar result. Sorry (battery died before I can finish...).
    – Hastur
    Sep 16, 2016 at 7:11
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    @Hastur: Those other programs do not ping.
    – dotancohen
    Sep 17, 2016 at 7:18
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They should be the same. Here is what I found:

Both commands are basically the same thing. The main difference is of the Operating System and how the command is implemented in the background.On the foreground you see the same kind of information in both cases. Traceroute is a computer network diagnostic tool, displaying the route and measuring transitdelays of packets across the network.

The command is available in Unix OS as ‘traceroute’, while it is available as ‘tracert’ in Windows NT based OS. For IPv6 it is often known as ‘tracert6’. In Linux the command sends sequence of User Data-gram Protocol tothe destination host by default. While in the case of Windows it sends ICMP echo requests instead of UDP packets.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-traceroute-and-tracert

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  • Note that some versions of Unix traceroute have a -i option to send ICMP instead of UDP. This can be useful when there are packet filters that block UDP to random ports.
    – Barmar
    Sep 16, 2016 at 17:31
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This is the difference:

  • traceroute: uses ICMP
  • tracert: uses UDP

I have to say that tracert lately has become my favourite tool:

enter image description here

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  • traceroute has lots of different options: icmp, tcp, udp, udplite, rawq, etc.
    – EML
    Jul 3, 2021 at 12:20
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I'm sure the answer they'd want is (C) Ping. If I just wanted to check round trip time from a workstation, that's what I'd use. It's quick, it's simple, and it's available in some form on just about every network-capable device in the world.

(A) Tracert and (B) Traceroute are very similar utilities on Windows and *nix, respectively. Deciding between those two answers would depend on the OS of the workstation, which is not specified.
Either would also tell you the round trip time to the endpoint, but also to every other router along the way. So they would work, but be slower and longer to type, and maybe not available on as many machines as ping.

(D) Pop is probably just a play on ping in this case. POP is an email protocol (and a sound, and a nickname for a father, etc.), but is very unrelated to this question.

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