Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Good Tutorial on TCP/IP Diagnostics using Traceroute

MTK, just sent me this today.  It's a presentation and paper by Richard A. Steenbergen, from 2009 that covers the finer points of diagnosing TCP/IP networking problems with Traceroute.  It looks like it was originally presented as a tutorial at NANOG.  Why am I posting this?  If you tried to google "traceroute tutorial" you'd get tons of fairly lame overviews that show some traceroute output and attempt to explain it. 

To quote one of the intro slides:
Few people are actually skilled at interpreting traceroute.  Most ISP NOCs and even most mid-level engineering staff are not able to correctly interpret a complex traceroute.  This Leads to a significant number of misdiagnosed issues, false reports, etc, which flood the NOCs of networks world-wide.  The false report rate is so high that it is almost impossible to
report a real traceroute-based issue through all the noise.
There is a lot of nitty gritty practical details in here. Even if you rarely use traceroute, you'll learn a lot from this. This is one of those rare, good presentations and papers to file away so you can refer back to it and hopefully use to enlighten others.
Hope This Helps.

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