On Wed, 26 Aug 1998, Phil Howard wrote:
william@pacific.net.ph writes:
8 * * * Request timed out.
Line 8 is always like this and a customer of ours is complaining about it. Is this a time out or congestion or something else?
Most likely there is a private address (in one of 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, or 192.168.0.0/16) being used there. Tell the customer it is not their router and to not worry about it.
Private addresses are often used this way. There are complications to it, and this is one of those.
Unless someone upstream from your location is blocking packets sourced from private space, that's probably not what's happening here. Remember at no time during a traceroute are you sending packets directly to any hop along the way, all packets have the destination address of the address you're tracing to. On the way back they have a source address of the router along the way, which might be private, but have a destination address of the machine you started the traceroute from. More likely the router in question is just not sending ICMP TTL expired, or it is unable to route packets going back toward you for some reason. As others have said, tell the customer that as long as the packets make it _through_ the router, it's not a problem. Brandon Ross Network Engineering 404-815-0770 800-719-4664 Director, Network Engineering, MindSpring Ent., Inc. info@mindspring.com ICQ: 2269442 Stop Smurf attacks! Configure your router interfaces to block directed broadcasts. See http://www.quadrunner.com/~chuegen/smurf.cgi for details.