What is 'traceroute'?

I use Little Snitch to alert me of outgoing communications from my G4 to the net. A few times per day I get a request from 'traceroute' to connect to an IP adsress - What is this?

I'm sorry i do not have any more information, but I will update this thread when the dialogue appears again.

The connection is a corporate Windows network.

Lee

traceroute is a command line program to, intuitively enough, trace the route (hops) to a remote address. It won't trigger itself automatically so I would guess it is a scheduled call from some application, cron, or launchd.

Kokopelli said:

traceroute is a command line program to, intuitively enough, trace the route (hops) to a remote address. It won't trigger itself automatically so I would guess it is a scheduled call from some application, cron, or launchd.

Click to expand...

Is there any way to trace where the program came from, or is it a generic program for any app? I'm suspicious about programs phoning home!

Not easily. If you catch it while it is active you can look in actvity monitor using "All Processes, Heirarchically".

Other than that I can't say, sorry. Little Snitch might hold the request so you might be able to check while it is asking if you will allow it. I am not sure since I do not use Little Snitch.