Traceroute in Photon OS
I recently had to troubleshoot a network connectivity issue, and was seeing some strange behaviour when comparing the Windows Client -> Photon Server trace to the same in the reverse direction. From Photon to Windows I was getting timeouts, and the trace never completed. When Windows was the source, it worked fine.
After some research, I found that Windows tracert uses ICMP and the tracepath utility that ships with Photon uses high range UDP ports to check connectivity. The firewall configuration of the network was preventing tracepath from working properly, and there’s no command line switches to force it to use ICMP. If I wanted to do an ICMP traceroute, I needed the traceroute package.
There is an official traceroute package for Photon, but it’s not installed on any of the VMware appliances I’ve come across yet. To obtain it, you can download the Photon ISO image, browse through the filesystem for the traceroute RPM, upload to the server and install.
Note: Installing non-standard packages or changing the out of the box config on your appliances may break future upgrades.