On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 16:33:34 +0300, Ammar Salih said:

I have a question for you, are you happy with the current network diagnostic tools, like ping, trace route .. etc, don't you think it's time to have an upgraded version of icmp protocol? from my side there is a lot that I can NOT do with current tools and protocols, here are few scenarios, and I would like to hear yours:

Upgrading ICMP protocol is... challenging. I wouldn't even bother with trying to do anything with IPv4. Might be some options for IPv6, *IF* you can provide a *specific* proposal that looks worth the added code and router complexity.... Also, remember that most routers will do packet forwarding in hardware if they can just suck in bits on one interface and toss them out another - but if they have to do stuff like create and send an ICMP TTL Exceeded packet, you end up on the control plane and probably rate-limited.

applications like (Paping), well it may help if the forward and return path of all packets are exactly the same.

That's a routing problem, not an ICMP problem. As are the remainder of your examples.

On 02/03/2014 05:33 AM, Ammar Salih wrote:

Hello NANOG list members,

I have a question for you, are you happy with the current network diagnostic tools, like ping, trace route .. etc,

What tools are you referring to by "..."? There are many others. I like tcptraceroute (there are two variants of it) and mtr.

don't you think it's time to have an upgraded version of icmp protocol?

What is it that you are thinking? ICMP is for signaling between machines. Increasing signaling for human diagnostics can lead to reconnaissance attacks. We don't want yet another option for some to incorrectly block ICMP [1], which in turn leads to other problems. [1] ... when they want to just block ICMP echo and reply, which is also bad enough and must be done really selectively.

First scenario:

To be able to troubleshoot advanced networks with complex QoS and policy-based routing configuration, where ping, traceroute and other network diagnostic tools do not provide accurate readings, for example, you are troubleshooting a web server with ping, and it looks functioning quite well (packet loss and round trip time is all good), but web services are still significantly slow, the fact is icmp and tcp:80 might have different priorities and bandwidth limits on each router along the path between the client and the server, in this case, network admins usually use telnet applications like (Paping), well it may help if the forward and return path of all packets are exactly the same.

tcptraceroute.

Second scenario:

So another possible scenario is that you need to determine readings for forward and return paths, TraceRoute for example gives you forward path only using icmp. But what if you need to troubleshoot a VoIP server for example, assuming that packets return path might not be the same as forward path.

It depends. Asymmetric routing is not necessarily bad unless it causes a problem like packet loss, high latency, etc. For example, if the return path has packet loss but you should 'hopefully' (yeah I know...) notice it in the traceroute if you increment the probe count or run it twice. Or try mtr, a periodic traceroute with different statistics presentation that significantly reduces the 'hopefully' problem.

Third scenario:

One of the most common problems in networking, is that you don't have access to all equipment between client and server, but you have to troubleshoot the path between them and to understand where the problem exactly is in order to contact the right person without having the privilege to check the configuration on each router.

This one's more difficult but also "it depends". State a specific problem case.

Fourth scenario:

Also, with trace route you can't determine the actual path, for example, the router may direct http traffic to proxy server while leaving other traffic going through a different hop.

tcptraceroute.