lft mit Homebrew, apt, MacPorts installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Upstream-Dokumentation
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• lft
• whob

Projektgeschichte

The official LFT page says LFT was first released publicly in 1998 under the name FFT. Its distinguishing idea was tracing with transport-layer probes, including TCP SYN or FIN probes to arbitrary services, instead of relying only on the classic UDP probe pattern associated with traditional traceroute.

The project has continued as an operational networking tool rather than a large hosted source-code community. The 3.95, 3.96, and 3.97 changelog entries document modernization work such as getaddrinfo/getnameinfo migration, asynchronous DNS through c-ares, Path MTU discovery, ncurses watch mode, and ECMP-stable tracing.

Adoptionsgeschichte

LFT's adoption is strongest among network engineers, reverse engineers, and operators who need route visibility across firewalls, ECMP paths, or protocol-specific forwarding behavior. Packaging in Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, and MacPorts makes it available in the same toolbox as traceroute, mtr, tcpdump, and whois.

Wie es verwendet wird

Users run `lft` to trace a path with TCP, UDP, ICMP, or RFC 1393 style probes, then use options for AS numbers, netblock names, verbose packet interpretation, or newer visual/statistical output. The bundled `whob` client provides quick origin-ASN and registry context for IP addresses.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

LFT is a classic small networking package: specialized, privilege-sensitive, and valuable when the default platform traceroute does not model the path a service actually takes. Its continued packaging matters because it preserves a 1990s diagnostic idea that remains relevant on filtered and load-balanced networks.

Zeitleiste

• 1998: The tool was released publicly under the name FFT, according to the official authors' note.
• Version 2.5: Recent releases at that point included WhoB as a standalone client in the LFT binary directory.
• 2026-03: LFT 3.95 modernized resolver APIs and added asynchronous DNS.
• 2026: LFT 3.96 added active Path MTU Discovery and richer per-hop statistics.
• 2026-04: LFT 3.98 was announced with build-system fixes for Linux packaging and autoconf.

Related projects

• LFT is related to traceroute, tcpdump/libpcap, whois clients, Prefix WhoIs, RIPE NCC and Team Cymru ASN lookups, mtr, and other operator-focused path diagnosis tools.

Quellen

• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/lft
• https://pwhois.org/lft
• https://pwhois.org/lft/CHANGELOG
• https://pwhois.org/lft/lft-manpage.html