To do a trace route in Win95/98/NT (same command for all three), open up a DOS prompt (or "command shell") and type the following line while your internet connection is active:
tracert
www.bladeforums.com > c:\test.txt
It'll sit there for a while then come back to a prompt. At that point, use Notepad, Wordpad or any other word processor/editor to pull up the file at c:\test.txt. Copy the contents into BF, like mine here:
Tracing route to bladeforums.com [216.199.11.131]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 10 ms <10 ms <10 ms fast3-0.inr-63-udo.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.215.1]
2 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms fast4-1-0.inr-102-eva.Berkeley.EDU [169.229.1.141]
3 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms f0-1-0.inr-107-eva.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.235.107]
4 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms fast4-0-0.inr-002-eva.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.0.34]
5 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms pos0-2.inr-000-eva.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.0.73]
6 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms c2-berk-gsr.calren2.net [128.32.0.90]
7 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms BERK--BERK-7507.POS.calren2.net [198.32.249.70]
8 <10 ms <10 ms 10 ms acr1-serial2-3-0.SanFranciscosfd.cw.net [206.24.211.133]
9 <10 ms <10 ms 10 ms corerouter1.SanFrancisco.cw.net [204.70.9.131]
10 <10 ms 10 ms <10 ms core4.SanFrancisco.cw.net [204.70.4.81]
11 <10 ms 10 ms 10 ms sl-stk-1-H9-0-T3.sprintlink.net [206.157.77.66]
12 <10 ms 10 ms 10 ms sl-bb11-stk-2-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.4.33]
13 40 ms 40 ms 40 ms sl-bb10-kc-5-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.9.205]
14 40 ms 40 ms 40 ms sl-bb10-kc-9-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.2.9]
15 50 ms 50 ms 51 ms sl-bb10-fw-10-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.9.254]
16 70 ms 80 ms 80 ms sl-bb10-orl-2-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.9.106]
17 70 ms 80 ms 80 ms sl-gw1-orl-0-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.2.166]
18 541 ms 541 ms 511 ms sl-leadingnet-1-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.152.150]
19 * 110 ms 120 ms 216.199.63.190
20 210 ms * * bladeforums.com [216.199.11.131]
21 141 ms 140 ms 190 ms bladeforums.com [216.199.11.131]
Trace complete.
---------------------------
Jim again. What you're seeing is the time delay at each connection link between your rig and the BF server. And according to my very fast connection at UC Berkeley, the single biggest delays in milliseconds is happening at 216.199.63.190 which is probably a router box that BF's server (216.199.11.131) is connected to. Those asterisks mean "it timed out" so they're even more of a delay than the last sprintlink.net hop. The fact that that's pretty slow is a clue there's a communication problem between there and the first box owned by BF's host in the 216.199 domain.
Aaaanyways. If those of you on Windows can do that tracert command to produce "test.txt" files and EMail them to Spark (rather than pasting 'em in this thread, unless that's what Spark wants) you'll be helping a lot.
Jim
