------------------------------------- It became a tongue-in-cheek interview question. What was boggling was the number of *IE's that failed trying to explain traceroute's mechanics. ------------------------------------ One thing I have done in the past is encourage the person to succeed at the interview, rather than see how they fail. I do this because some folks don't interview well, but they really know their stuff or have other attributes that make them desirable, such as a great work ethic and a desire to learn. One way to do this is find out how they'd go about solving a problem, rather than what find out what they've memorized. :: We need a pool on what percentage of readers just :: googled traceroute. Exactly. I've read ras' paper several times, but I don't memorize it. If I need to look something about it up for some reason, I know where to go: https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Sunday/RAS_Traceroute_N... Ask me in an interview when I'm nervous and I stumble like a nerd asking a girl out on a date. Say something a little silly then try to recover only to say something more dumb finally trying to recover from both only to say something stupid and finally throwing up my hands in disgust knowing I'm not going to get the date/job. :-) This happened to me around 6-8 months ago. scott