We get sporadic connection fails from webserver to another server. We intended to use tracert based on sockets to determine where it fails. Unfortunately it is impossible to create RAW sockets on webserver due to it's not ran under root (and we cannot do this obvously).
Is there a way to traceroute from PHP without sockets?
you may hunt for nqt.php to get some hint about how to proceed: is an ancient tool that was able to do all the net stuff from a php page (i don't know the internals but may be a good starting point).
some link to test (found using google):
http://www.vanheusden.com/misc/nqt.php
http://eaglesflight.org/nqt.php
the only download i found (i don't know if it is the most recent version):
http://nerdbynature.de/bits/misc/nqt.php.txt