rhel tcptraceroute

RedHat's tcptraceroute is a useless symlink to regular old UDP traceroute. The symlink violates the principle of least surprise. This can get in your way as you quickly try to solve a problem.

$ ls -l `which tcptraceroute` 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 May 29 05:35 /bin/tcptraceroute -> traceroute
$ 

They also have nothing in their repository that you can 'yum install'. Come on RedHat, it's GPL'd! To get past this you can update your repository or simply:

wget http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/dries.ulyssis.org/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/RPMS.dries/tcptraceroute-1.5-0.beta7.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -iv tcptraceroute-1.5-0.beta7.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rm /bin/tcptraceroute
which tcptraceroute

The 'rm' removes the symlink and the 'which' should return /usr/bin/tcptraceroute.