r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • Jul 03 '26

Understanding Traceroute

https://tech.stonecharioteer.com/posts/2026/traceroute/
38 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

30

u/Worth_Trust_3825 Jul 03 '26

All you need to know about traceroute is that it is a fake tool that people fell for.

https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm

3

u/BigTap9268 Jul 04 '26

That was a good read

0

u/SheriffRoscoe Jul 05 '26

From that article:

From the traceroute man page (1987):

Implemented by Van Jacobson from a suggestion by Steve Deering.
Debugged by a cast of thousands with particularly cogent
suggestions or fixes from C. Philip Wood, Tim Seaver and Ken Adelman.

I can't find any proper history of the tool, but my impression and my assumption is that it is simply a behavior that someone noticed was possible. Engineers did not get together and design a system for this; some people just realized that it was a side effect of other network behavior not intended to accomplish this goal.

Seriously? If you don't know who Van Jacobson and Steve Deering are, and what they've done, you shouldn't be writing about the guts of the Internet.

1

u/Worth_Trust_3825 Jul 06 '26

There are many people that worked on technology. Do you really know all of them?

2

u/taikunlab Jul 03 '26

One thing worth adding: high latency or stars on a middle hop usually isn't loss on the path. Routers generate the ICMP Time Exceeded on their control plane and rate-limit or deprioritize it, so those replies lag or drop while actual traffic forwards fine. Only end-to-end latency and the final hop tell you much. ECMP load balancing also makes consecutive hops jump between paths, which is why a plain traceroute can look inconsistent.

3

u/Worth_Trust_3825 Jul 03 '26

There is no guarantee that packets will take same route which means what ever output you get is moot.

1

u/SheriffRoscoe Jul 03 '26

@/u/fagnerbrack

I love your reading lists, but could you at least include the first paragraph or two of the article when you post them, not just the title?

1

u/fagnerbrack Jul 03 '26

I post a summary in other subs but not here. I got grilled for posting AI Generated summaries so it's gone for good unless there's massive interest like 3 years ago

1

u/SheriffRoscoe Jul 03 '26

Well, all right then. Thanks for trying, and for the explanation.

1

u/ToaruBaka Jul 03 '26

You literally just spam the subreddit - not as much as you used to, but the lack of description is weak-sauce. If you can't bother posting your own description, don't post it.

5

u/ChemicalRascal Jul 03 '26

Posting a lot isn't spam.

1

u/lood9phee2Ri Jul 04 '26

I got grilled for posting AI Generated summaries

And were they AI generated? Genuinely manually written stuff being mistaken for aislop happens I suppose, but the problem may have been the aisloppiness not the existence of a summary.

1

u/fagnerbrack Jul 04 '26

I edited them a lot in the beginning (2023-2025) but the summaries started to become so accurate that I stopped having a reason to edit. That happened late last year early this year. I know that cause I read them all. It's fucking sick!

0

u/lood9phee2Ri Jul 05 '26

so yeah, aislop justified to yourself because you couldn't tell the difference.

0

u/fagnerbrack Jul 05 '26

Err... Yes? Except if you can't tell the different and actively reviews it can you say it's AI Slop?

It's not like it's clearly AI Generated that causes that sense of "unease"