On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, chip wrote:
On 9/6/05, Joe Maimon <jmaimon@ttec.com> wrote:
If the hop(s) following the one you see loss for shows no loss, then disregard the loss for that hop, obviously whatever it is, it does not affect transit, which is what you really want to know.
Is that correct?
This is one of the most misunderstood concepts in properly reading output from a traceroute (mtr, visualtraceroute, whatever). Basically you are seeing loss of packets destined directly *TO* that router, not THRU it. Most
no... not destined TO the router, destined THROUGH the router that happen to TTL=0 ON that router.
Very true. Most backbone kit on a tier 1 network is designed to switch packets in a distributed fashion, shifting packets between ports/cards over a backplane of some sort. On such kit, generating things such as a TTL-exceeded packet is usually punted to a central processor (whose primary task is to build route tables to hand off to the cards), which deals with the task in a much slower and much lower priority way than packets which transit the routing device. You also don't want your central processor to have to deal with too much of this sort of thing, which is (at least one of the reasons) why it's often rate limited.
which is also misunderstood by just about everyone :( but anyway... 'not affecting transit' for reasons sited by yourself and min and adam already, yes.
Agreed. SB -- Stewart Bamford (Posting as an individual) Level3 Snr IP Engineer *** Views expressed are my own and not necessarily those of Level3 *** Primary email stewart@whoever.com Secondary email me@stewartb.com Personal website http://www.stewartb.com/