How to get traceroute on cygwin

cygwin;package-managementtraceroute

The implementation of traceroute(tracert) differs on Windows and Unix. I wanted to compare both with Wireshark. I am on Windows 7 now and I wanted to get Unix traceroute implementation quickly.

My first idea was to get it using MSYS or Cygwin. I installed Cygwin with "inetutils*" packages checked, but there is no traceroute command and corresponding executable in /usr/bin/.

I also tried searching for "traceroute" with Cygwin package search and found this substring in list of "zsh" files. I installed zsh and tried traceroute and tcptraceroute with no results.

Which package should i check for installation of traceroute and is there traceroute for Cygwin at all?

Best Answer

There is no traceroute in the Cygwin packages, because tracert is always available on Windows. See https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-12/msg00443.html for a thread briefly discussing this. You can try compiling a Unix-style traceroute from source usign Cygwin.

If you want to compare Windows-style tracert to Unix-style traceroute though, I'd recommend running traceroute on Unix or Linux, because the network stacks are different; so running a Unix-style traceroute on Windows won't give you quite the same network traces as Unix-style traceroute on Unix.

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How to make traceroute trace beyond 30 hops

From man 1 traceroute:

-m max_ttl
      Specifies  the  maximum  number of hops (max time-to-live value)
      traceroute will probe. The default is 30.

Ssh – Cannot login or ssh to non-admin Cygwin user this month but could last month and still can for other non-admin user

After further research (here and here) I'm inclined to think the issue is NOT with Cygwin but rather with Windows 10. A light-bulb turned on in my head when I was in User2's Windows account yesterday and noticed I could launch Task Manager without a UAC prompt--something I knew User1 was always prompted for post Windows 10 upgrade from Windows 8 (despite that upgrade taking place almost a year ago during the free upgrade to Win 10 promotion). I figured it was a Windows 10 thing and never thought twice. When I realized it was happening prompt-free for User2 and googled work-arounds to fix it for User1, I found I could use the same work-around for User1's Cygwin issue. It still doesn't answer how User1's account got messed up in the first place, nor how to actually fix it the correct way, but I'm satisfied with this work-around as I can now get my git changes done for User1.

TL;DR

WORK-AROUND:

Open command-line (CMD.EXE) and set this variable to stop getting the UAC pop-up prompt:


set __compat_layer=runasinvoker

From the same terminal the environment variable was set, launch Cygwin:


c:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe

To make this permanent for this user (and make the desktop icon work again)


setx __compat_layer "runasinvoker"

To make this permanent for all users machine-wide, open admin command-line, then:


setx /m __compat_layer "runasinvoker"

And finally, to access git without fixing Cygwin, install "Git Bash".

Caveat: With the User1 account still technically broken, I still cannot use ssh to login but I can at least get to local Cygwin Terminal as User1. Also this work-around does not fix ability to modify User1's Windows User Environment variables via sysdm.cpl GUI (still get UAC prompt and then after only shows Admin's ENV vars instead of User1's) but that's something for the Windows-related Stack Exchange forum now that I know this is a Windows account problem and not Cygwin's. And SETX allows altering user and machine ENV vars from command-line.

Best Answer

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How to make traceroute trace beyond 30 hops

Ssh – Cannot login or ssh to non-admin Cygwin user this month but could last month and still can for other non-admin user

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