On 9/16/11 11:42 , Steve Bohrer wrote:
My general question is "what meaning do I give to lossy traceroutes, even when pings show no problem."
Can I expect that backbone routers should never give me timeouts on a traceroute through them, so, lots of asterisks from these systems indicate a packet loss problem that needs to be fixed?
generation of icmp exceptions e.g. ttl exceeded can/is delberately rate limited, such traffic is sent up to the control plane. if a router is passing traffic loss free through the forwarding plane then you can conclude that it's loss free through the forwarding plane.
Or, are these traceroute asterisks essentially meaningless, and should be expected on any busy link?
more like it's not trivial to conclude what they mean.