CAFAI Liens en Vrac 23/01/2015 Many of the network cartography tools and protocols we commonly use are defined through a set of standards called Request For Comments (RFCs). Surprisingly, not all of the tools we take for granted are covered by these. Take the humble traceroute for example. Do you actually know what really happens when Alice tries to trace the route to Bob? Read on to find out.
ICMP, UDP, TCP and IP. Oh my!
Traceroutes work by manipulating a field in an IP packet called Time-To-Live. Despite sounding a bit like a James Bond film title, the time to live field simply tells the device a packet is passing through how many more systems (or hops) a packet can pass through before being dropped. This is to ensure that packets don’t just simply run around the Internet forever clogging it up.
The Time-To-Live (also referred to as TTL) field is decremented as it passes through each network hop. When it reaches zero, a router will drop the packet being sent through it and send an ICMP Time-To-Live exceeded message back to the source.
We can (ab)use this in order to determine both the route to a particular host or network and the time it takes for a message to be sent and a response to be received by using a traceroute implementation. There are two main forms of traceroute, an ICMP traceroute used by Windows, and the UDP traceroute used pretty much everywhere else. If you were hoping for a nice clean set of standards, the water here is as clear as SNMP is simple (i.e. not very once you look under the hood).
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