mtr combines the functionality of the 'traceroute' and 'ping' programs in a single network diagnostic tool.
As mtr starts, it investigates the network connection between the host mtr runs on and a user-specified destination host. After it determines the address of each network hop between the machines, it sends a sequence of ICMP ECHO requests to each one to determine the quality of the link to each machine. As it does this, it prints running statistics about each machine.
mtr is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2. See the COPYING file for details.
If you're building this from a tarball, compiling mtr is as simple as:
./configure && make
(in the past, there was a Makefile in the distribution that did
the ./configure for you and then ran make again with the generated
Makefile, but this has suffered some bitrot. It didn't work well
with git.)
If you're building from the git repository, you'll need to run:
./bootstrap.sh && ./configure && make
When it looks as if the compilation was successful, you can test mtr with
sudo ./mtr <host>
(fill in a hostname or IP address where it says ) or immediately continue on to installing:
make install
Note that mtr-packet must be suid-root because it requires access to raw IP sockets. See SECURITY for security information.
Older versions used to require a non-existent path to GTK for a
correct build of a non-gtk version while GTK was installed. This is
no longer necessary. ./configure --without-gtk should now work.
If it doesn't, try make WITHOUT_X11=YES as the make step.
On Solaris, you'll need to use GNU make to build.
(Use gmake rather than make.)
On Solaris (and possibly other systems) the "gtk" library may be
installed in a directory where the dynamic linker refuses to look when
a binary is setuid. Roman Shterenzon reports that adding
-Wl,-rpath=/usr/lib
to the commandline will work if you are using gnu LD. He tells me that
you're out of luck when you use the sun LD. That's not quite true, as
you can move the gtk libraries to /usr/lib instead of leaving them in
/usr/local/lib. (when the ld tells you that /usr/local/lib is untrusted
and /usr/lib is trusted, and you trust the gtk libs enough to want them
in a setuid program, then there is something to say for moving them
to the "trusted" directory.)
Building on MacOS should not require any special steps.
Building for Windows requires Cygwin. To obtain Cygwin, see
https://cygwin.com/install.html.
Next, re-run cygwin's setup-x86.exe (or setup-x86_64.exe if you're using 64bit cygwin) with the following arguments,
which will install the packages required for building:
setup-x86.exe --package-manager --wait --packages automake,pkg-config,make,gcc-core,libncurses-devel
Build as under Unix:
./bootstrap.sh && ./configure && make
Finally, install the built binaries:
make install
mtr is now hosted on github. https://github.com/traviscross/mtr
See the mtr web page at http://www.BitWizard.nl/mtr/
Bug reports and feature requests should be submitted to the Github bug tracking system.
Patches can be submitted by cloning the Github repository and issuing a pull request, or by email to me. Please use unified diffs. Usually the diff is sort of messy, so please check that the diff is clean and doesn't contain too much of your local stuff (for example, I don't want/need the "configure" script that /your/ automake made for you).
(There used to be a mailinglist, but all it got was spam. So when the server was upgraded, the mailing list died.)
REW