 Traceroute is also used by penetration testers to gather information about network infrastructure and IP ranges around a given host.It can also be used when downloading data, and if there are multiple mirrors available for the same piece of data, each mirror can be traced to get an idea of which mirror would be the fastest to use.The traceroute manual page states that the original traceroute program was written by Van Jacobson in 1987 from a suggestion by Steve Deering, with particularly cogent suggestions or fixes from C. Philip Wood, Tim Seaver and Ken Adelman.