<finishes hyperventilating into paper sack> i am sick of explaining to people that traceroute is a useless fake snake oil tool unless you are a god-tier network engineer with knowledge of every single network and node between the endpoints
traceroute should not be in the standard network tools on most machines, and people should be educated on how fucking useless it is. if you run a traceroute over commodity internet you're just pissing into the wind, completely pissing into the wind
"i'm getting timeouts" okay where do you want to start? routers that drop icmp bc they have no cpu time on the compute plane? acls that block ttl exceeded? non-layer-3 nodes?
mpls? multipath routes between disparate routers? IXPs? how deep up the asshole of the last 30 years of network tech do i need to go before you'll recognize that you've never seen anything coherent from this horseshit college student hack
traceroute! is! not! a! standard! it is an abuse of the ICMP protocol suite! it is a clever hack that NEVER SHOULD HAVE LEFT A FUCKING UNIVERSITY
this is not disputable! traceroute is not a standard!!! there is no rfc!! it's just a cute thing some nerd figured out that router vendors and network operators do not give a shit about and do not break their backs to support.
network operators constantly and happily break traceroute. working systems time out on 9 out of 12 hops. traceroute to a firewall or router will just sit and spin until it hits TTL 30 after the last ISP gateway because CPE ROUTERS AND FIREWALLS DONT SEND TTL EXCEEDED
i'm so tired of explaining this. i've been explaining this at work for six years. i've been explaining it to the same people and they don't listen. it never gets them anything, it's just masturbatory, this smug feeling of having Done Something by running traceroute.
if i had the option i would remove traceroute from all our bastion nodes and make using it on a customer router a disciplinary hit
