Telnet, ifconfig, and netstat, and more, all have better replacements.
Traceroute is still a great tool, but mtr ("my traceroute") provides even more insights when you're looking into network routing problems. The mtr tool—“my traceroute”, originally “Matt’s traceroute” ...
I have a Gentoo Linux box, on which I regularly emerge --sync and emerge --update (so, everything on the system should be within a long-weekend of the current version that's stable in the emerge ...