TCTRACE(1)

📦 version 0.10, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 TCTRACE(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual page for tctrace — she's giving traceroute's cooler cousin, and she is not like other girls (other girls use UDP). 🦋

🌸 NAME 🌸

tctrace — literally just like traceroute, except she traces with TCP SYN packets. periodt. 💅

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this page is the quick lil' rundown of the tctrace command, no cap. fun fact: this manual page was written for the Debian distribution specifically because the original program doesn't even have a manual page — she's out here undocumented and thriving, and we had to fix that. 😭

TCtrace is, like, the sibling of itrace, and also a traceroute(1) brother — but the whole vibe is that she traces using TCP SYN packets. 👑

the way that this slays is: it lets you trace through firewalls, as long as you know one TCP service that's allowed to pass from the outside. firewall said "no ❤️" and tctrace said "watch me". 🔥

Typical Usage:

tctrace -i eth0 -d www.phenoelit.de

and now the flags, bestie, one by one, nothing skipped, iykyk:

  • -v — verbose. she talks more. 🗣️
  • -n — reverse lookup the answering IPs (this one is slow! like actually slow, be warned, it's giving dial-up energy 🐌)
  • -p x — send x probes per hop (default=3)
  • -m x — set the TTL max to x (default=30)
  • -t x — timeout after x seconds (default=3)
  • -D x — destination port x (default=80)
  • -S x — source port x (default=1064)
  • -i interface — the normal eth0 stuff 💁
  • -d destination — name or IP of the destination
⚠️ okay so heads up, there have been bugs reported on tctrace. she sometimes has a mind of her own. not me defending her — she's just ✨unpredictable✨. main character energy, but like, in a chaotic way. 💀

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

this manual page was written by Vince Mulhollon <vlm@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). we love a generous king. 🫶

and that's the whole page, babe — it was last touched on January 13, 2003, and it's from the TCTRACE(1) section of the manual. stay safe out there tracing through firewalls, mwah 💖✨🌸🦋

📦 where this page comes from