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Avoiding traceroute anomalies with Paris traceroute

Published: 25 October 2006 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Traceroute is widely used, from the diagnosis of network problems to the assemblage of internet maps. However, there are a few serious problems with this tool, in particular due to the presence of load balancing routers in the network. This paper describes a number of anomalies that arise in nearly all traceroute-based measurements. We categorize them as "loops", "cycles", and "diamonds". We provide a new publicly-available traceroute, called Paris traceroute, which controls packet header contents to obtain a more precise picture of the actual routes that packets follow. This new tool allows us to find conclusive explanations for some of the anomalies, and to suggest possible causes for others.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IMC '06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
      October 2006
      356 pages
      ISBN:1595935614
      DOI:10.1145/1177080
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 25 October 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. load balancing
      2. traceroute

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      October 25 - 27, 2006
      Rio de Janeriro, Brazil

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