Chapter 8

Chapter 8

8.1

What can happen if an IP implementation decrements the incoming TTL and then tests for equal to 0?

A:

If an incoming datagram has a TTL of 0, doing the decrement and then test would set the TTL to 255 and let the datagram continue. Although a router should never receive a datagram with a TTL of 0, it has occurred.

8.2

How does traceroute calculate the RTT? Compare this to the RTT calculation done by ping .

A:

We noted that traceroute stores 12 bytes of data in the data portion of the UDP datagram, part of which is the time the datagram was sent. From Figure 6.9, however, we see that ICMP only returns the first 8 bytes of the IP datagram that was in error, and we noted there that this is the 8-byte UDP header. Therefore the time value stored by traceroute is not returned in the ICMP error message. traceroute saves the time when it sends a packet, and when an ICMP reply is received, fetches the current time and subtracts the two value to get the RTT.

Recall from Chapter 7 that ping stored the time in the outgoing ICMP echo request and this data was echoed by the server. This allowed ping to print the correct RTT, even if the packets were returned out of order.

8.3

(This exercise and the next one are based on actual problems determined when traceroute was being developed, and are from comments in the traceroute source code.) Assume there are three routers (Rl, R2, and R3) between the source and destination and that the middle router (R2) decrements the TTL but incorrectly forwards the IP datagram when the incoming TTL was 1. Describe what happens. How can you see this occur when running traceroute ?

A:

The first line of output is correct and identifies R1. The next probe starts with a TTL of 2, and this is decremented by R1. When R2 receives this it decrements the TTL from 1 to 0 but incorrectly forwards it to R3. R3 sees that the incoming TTL is 0 and sends back the time exceeded. This means the second line of output (for the TTL of 2) identifies R3, not R2. The third line of output correctly identifies R3. The clue that this bug is present is two consecutive lines of output that identify the same router.

8.4

Again assume there are three routers between the source and destination. This time the destination host has a bug whereby it always uses the incoming TTL as the outgoing TTL of an ICMP message. Describe what happens and how you would see this.

A:

In this case the TTL of 1 identifies R1, the TTL of 2 identifies R2, and the TTL of 3 identifies R3; but when the TTL is 4 the UDP datagram gets to the destination with an incoming TTL of 1. The ICMP port unreachable is generated, but its TTL is 1 (incorrectly copied from the incoming TTL). This ICMP message goes to R3 where the TTL is decremented and the message discarded. An ICMP time exceeded is not generated, since the datagram that was discarded was an ICMP error message (port unreachable). A similar scenario occurs for the probe with a TTL of 5, but this time the outgoing port unreachable starts with a TTL of 2 (the incoming TTL) and makes it back to R2, where it's discarded. The port unreachable corresponding to the probe with a TTL of 6 makes it back to R1, where it's discarded. Finally the port unreachable for the probe with a TTL of 7 makes it all the way back, where it arrives with an incoming TTL of 1. ( traceroute considers an arriving ICMP message with a TTL of 0 or 1 to be suspicious, so it prints an exclamation point after the RTT.) In summary, the lines for a TTL of 1, 2, and 3 correctly identify R1, R2, and R3, followed by three lines each containing three timeouts, followed by the line for a TTL of 7 that identifies the destination.

8.5

We can run tcpdump on the SLIP link between sun and netb when running the example from Figure 8.8. If we specify the -v option we can see the TTL value of the returned ICMP messages. Doing this shows the incoming TTL from netb to be 255, from butch it's 253, from Gabby it's 252, and from enssl42.UT.westnet.net it's 249. Does this give any additional information about whether there really are some missing routers?

A:

It appears that all these routers initialize the outgoing TTL of an ICMP message to 255. This is common. The incoming value of 255 from netb is what we expect, but the value of 253 from butch means there is probably a missing router between it and netb. Otherwise we would expect an incoming TTL of 254 at this point. Similarly, from enss142.UT.westnet.net we expect a value of 252, not 249. It appears these missing routers are not handling the outbound UDP datagram correctly, but they are decrementing the TTL on the returned ICMP message correctly.

We must be careful when looking at the incoming TTL, since sometimes a value other than what we expect can be caused by the return ICMP message taking a different path from the outbound UDP datagram. In this example, however, it confirms what we suspect ”there are missing routers that traceroute is not finding when the loose source routing option is used.

8.7

Compare the ways ping and traceroute handle multiple instances of the client on the same host.

A:

The ping client sets the identifier field in the ICMP echo request message (Figure 7.1) to its process ID. The ICMP echo reply contains this identifier field. Each client looks at this returned identifier field and handles only those that it sent.

The traceroute client sets its UDP source port number to the logical-OR of its process ID and 32768. Since the returned ICMP message always contains the first 8 bytes of the IP datagram that generated the error (Figure 6.9), which includes the entire UDP header, this source port number is returned in the ICMP error.

8.8

Compare the ways ping and traceroute measure the round-trip time.

A:

The ping client sets the optional data portion of the ICMP echo request message to the time at which the packet is sent. This optional data must be returned in the ICMP echo reply. This allows ping to calculate the accurate round-trip time, even if packets are returned out of order.

The traceroute client can't operate this way because all that's returned in the ICMP error is the UDP header (Figure 6.9), none of the UDP data. Therefore traceroute must remember when it sends a request, wait for the reply, and calculate the time difference.

This illustrates another difference between Ping and Traceroute: Ping sends one packet a second, regardless of whether it receives any replies, while Traceroute sends a request and then waits for either a reply or a timeout before sending the next request.

8.9

We said traceroute picks the starting UDP destination port number at 33435 and increments this by one for each packet sent. In Section 1.9 we said ephemeral port numbers are normally between 1024 and 5000, making it unlikely that Traceroute's destination port is in use on the destination host. Is this still true under Solaris 2.2? ( Hint : Read Section E.4.)

A:

Since Solaris 2.2 starts ephemeral UDP port numbers at 32768 by default, there is a much greater chance that the destination port is in use on the destination host.



TCP.IP Illustrated, Volume 1. The Protocols
TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1: The Protocols (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
ISBN: 0201633469
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1993
Pages: 378

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