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Producing a TraceRt Log For Analysis

Many network problems that affect your use of Blogger, such as the currently obnoxious "Server Error 1-500", can be diagnosed, if we can understand how you are connecting to Blogger. A TraceRoute log shows us the path that your connection takes to a given server, and is very useful in this case.

On most systems, TraceRoute is run as "tracert". Here we have a tracert targeting "www.google.com". Choose your target according to your need.
  1. Open a command window.
  2. Type "tracert www.google.com >c:\tracert.txt" (less the "") at the command prompt.
  3. Type "notepad c:\tracert.txt" (less the "") at the command prompt.
  4. Copy, and paste, the entire log, as displayed in Notepad, into your email or forum post. Please don't munge, or disguise, any details.
It really is simple - when you know how. Just be generous - and precise (see the spaces in the commands?).

Here's a sample log.

C:\>tracert www.google.com

Tracing route to www.l.google.com [66.249.89.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 40 ms 43 ms 41 ms 10.122.84.253
3 42 ms 41 ms 43 ms 10.122.84.254
4 54 ms 55 ms 55 ms 10.121.20.1
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 51 ms 53 ms 51 ms 58.147.0.52
7 53 ms 51 ms 53 ms 58.147.0.46
8 268 ms 275 ms 271 ms 202.47.254.161
9 270 ms 269 ms 269 ms 202.47.253.148
10 280 ms 283 ms 283 ms 203.208.191.197
11 297 ms 299 ms 283 ms ge-0-1-0-0.sngtp-cr1.ix.singtel.com [203.208.149.201]
12 283 ms 339 ms 285 ms so-2-1-0-0.hkgcw-cr2.ix.singtel.com [203.208.154.38]

13 114 ms 115 ms 113 ms 72.14.196.5
14 118 ms 117 ms 117 ms 216.239.43.68
15 144 ms 137 ms 141 ms 66.249.95.198
16 142 ms 137 ms 139 ms 72.14.232.166
17 178 ms 171 ms 167 ms 72.14.236.236
18 175 ms 173 ms 175 ms 66.249.95.197
19 176 ms 181 ms 177 ms 216.239.47.54
20 176 ms 177 ms 175 ms jp-in-f99.google.com [66.249.89.99]

Trace complete.

You have two classes of information there. The list of IP addresses are very important, to understand the path that your traffic may take, between your computer and the Google server. The timings (or lack of them, as in "Request timed out") are not so important.

In many cases, a router (represented by one of the IP addresses in the list), though it will identify itself in the list, will prevent you from probing it for a timed response. The error "Request timed out" won't be as significant as the IP addresses.

See hops 10 - 12, highlighted above? Those represent routers operated by Singnet ("Singtel"), which are the suspected cause of the problems when this article was originally written.

If your computer runs a current version of Microsoft Windows, you may be able to run an improved equivalent of "TraceRoute", known as "PathPing", which produces a better organised log.

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