[32566] in North American Network Operators' Group

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Traceroute versus other performance measurement

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Bradford)
Wed Nov 29 10:18:36 2000

From: Paul Bradford <paul@adelphia.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 10:07:59 -0500
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I have been reading NANOG posts for probably 2 years now.. this is my 1st post.
  
I need help with a reality/sanity check.   Traceroute is a good tool for
checking for routing type problems (loops).  Does anyone feel it's a good tool
to use for testing "bandwidth"....  My obvious answer is it isn't a good tool
for that....  One problem I see is that the way traceroute works, if a
transport mixes media between say Ethernet to LANE and back to Ethernet you
give room for Destination unreachable responses from a trace route because you
have to to packet switching medias with a fast cell switched media in
between.... packets less than 64k (like traceroute info) are easily lost in the
conversion from ethernet to LANE.

Does this sound right?
Thanks,
Paul A. Bradford



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