What is mturoute?

mturoute

mturoute is a handy little command line tool designed to help you find the MTU values along the path from your computer to another system. It uses ICMP pings of different sizes, which might sound a bit technical, but it’s pretty straightforward! Plus, there's a cool feature that works like a traceroute, letting you see the lowest MTU between your local machine and each hop on the network.

Understanding MTU Values

This utility can generate about 100 times more traffic than your typical ping. So, if you're using it on networks you don’t manage, just be careful! When I was testing it out, I even had my ICMP capability turned off a few times. But no worries—a quick power cycle on my cable modem fixed everything up!

How Does mturoute Work?

Mturoute sends a specific type of ICMP probe to the target IP address with a payload size you choose. Since the "do-not-fragment" bit is set, any network devices with an MTU smaller than this packet size will drop it. Based on whether or not it gets a response, mturoute adjusts its next probe's payload size. It narrows down the search for MTU values by about 50% each time until it finds the best possible size.

Traceroute Mode Explained

When you use mturoute in -t “traceroute” mode, it does this same process for every hop along the way to your destination. The output shows an MTU value for each hop by only displaying some progress markers (+/-) instead of all that data cluttering up your screen.

Sensitivity to Packet Loss

One thing to keep in mind is that mturoute can be sensitive to packets that get dropped for reasons other than MTU issues. If packets are lost for different reasons, you might get incorrect readings of your MTU values. The newer version (v2) tries to re-probe when packets get dropped to help avoid these errors.

Adjusting Probe Settings

If you want to skip testing MTU sizes altogether, you can use the -f flag. This turns off the "do not fragment" bit so intermediate routers can break down probes into smaller packets if needed. You’ll also find settings like -w for response wait time and -i for probe interval length were added in v2.

Tweaking Your Probes

The new -r setting lets you specify how many times mturoute should retry if there’s a timeout during probing—default is three retries! And if you're curious about what's going on under the hood while it's running, try using -d for extra debugging info.

You can also set a maximum probe size with -m (default is 10,000 bits) and check version info using -v since earlier versions didn’t include any version data!

If you're interested in trying mturoute, it's definitely worth checking out!

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