I found a odd anomaly running the traceroute command on an old Red Hat 4 box. When you run traceroute -r -F ipaddress it works fine and if you run that command back to back, there is a 5 second delay in the reported result and it's worrisome. I asked a friend to run the same test in a completely different environment and he was able to replicate the delayed response from traceroute. I am thinking there must be a network tool that has implemented their own traceroute utility which won't have this weird behaviour? Although I will say that when I run traceroute -I (upper case i) to use ICMP instead of UDP the behaviour is not nearly as bad. And by the way, I was not aware that by default traceroute on Linux used high UDP ports which caught me by surprise seeing ICMP port unreachable messages in a network capture, running the default traceroute. Is that just how its always been? I tested traceroute on a separate OS than Linux and that traceroute used ICMP. So far I've tested hping and this may not work since (I can't verify) it only uses TCP for traceroutes. I also tried nmap, but it isn't installed by default on Red Hat so this won't work either. The other tool that I found to work and will need to probably look into further was mtr. Anybody here can recommend a better tool for the job?