Traceroute has helped me solve a lot of problems quickly and easily.
A few weeks ago I was volunteering for a local political party and they had several services down. They had no idea where they were hosted, how they were hosted, why, etc.
I ran traceroute on all of them and within minutes I was able to tell which ones were hosted together and approximately where, and when I brought that to the team it was enough information to jog memories and map IPs and WHOIS data to various services, data from email searches, etc.
Without that it would have been a lot of guesswork, possibly for days.
It turned out most of them were hosted by a service which moved their accounts to a new IP. One other was hosted elsewhere and turned out to be broken for longer than they realized.
A few weeks ago I was volunteering for a local political party and they had several services down. They had no idea where they were hosted, how they were hosted, why, etc.
I ran traceroute on all of them and within minutes I was able to tell which ones were hosted together and approximately where, and when I brought that to the team it was enough information to jog memories and map IPs and WHOIS data to various services, data from email searches, etc.
Without that it would have been a lot of guesswork, possibly for days.
It turned out most of them were hosted by a service which moved their accounts to a new IP. One other was hosted elsewhere and turned out to be broken for longer than they realized.
Absolute chaos.