PingPlotter should do a good job with detecting if a gateway should be used and sending to that gateway, but might not work correctly with multiple gateways, or other complicated network setups. This is very powerful, but also means that the Windows protocol stacks don't help us with routing or validation of the packet. WinPcap allows PingPlotter to send packets directly to the network card.

Shortcomings with WinPcap and PingPlotter

Make sure PingPlotter is configured to use WinPcap (the default configuration is to use it if its installed, so it should 'just work').

The WinPcap download page has reasonably good instructions. If you're using Windows Vista 圆4, then 4.0 or higher is required.

Visit the WinPcap site so you know what you're installing.

This driver needs to be installed before PingPlotter can use it, and should be downloaded and installed based on the WinPcap instructions. To make this as reliable as we could, we decided to use an open source (and free) driver, WinPcap to send raw sockets. We'll update this page with more information if we find other situations where it's helpful. If you're using an older operating system (Windows 98, or Windows 2000 for example), then you probably don't need to use WinPcap. If you want to use TCP traceroute and your operating system is Windows XP SP2 or newer, then you will need to use WinPCap. Since many of our users rely on Windows firewall service and/or Windows ICS (internet connection sharing), we've implemented a solution that uses a device driver to create TCP raw sockets.

A piece of software (ie: PingPlotter) can use a device driver to bypass this restriction.

Issuing a 'net stop sharedaccess' command from a command prompt will disable the raw socket block.

Turn off the Windows firewall service.

There are several ways to 'work around' this limitation in Windows, including: See a Microsoft white paper for some more details on this. One challenge that many users will face is that Windows started blocking the ability to create TCP packets with the options needed for traceroute (starting with Windows XP SP2). TCP traceroute allows access to some targets that were not previously available, but this comes with some caveats. Starting with PingPlotter 2.60, TCP packets can be used in addition to the previously available ICMP and UDP packet types.

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