Re: random testing...

Neal Cardwell (cardwell@cs.washington.edu)
Tue, 11 May 1999 01:49:17 -0700 (PDT)

Cool! As another application, presumably senders (like TCP Vegas) could
use these as heuristics to provide clues as to when routes have changed.

Hmmm. Although... Do level 2 routes change much? And are there many
asymmetries in these systems? (ATM,...)

neal

On Mon, 10 May 1999, Stefan Savage wrote:

> Here's a really stupid test for path symmetry.
>
> 1) do a traceroute from A to B, number of hops reported = n
> 2) send a ping from A to B and look at the ttl field, most os's start ttl at
> 64 or 255 (easy to figure out which). Subtract from ttl value.
>
> 3) now take the difference of these two numbers. If the difference is large
> then there are alot more hops in one direction than the other. I've found a
> couple doozies, but generally folks are pretty close. It'd be a one day
> project for someone to built a random tester to measure this though.
>
> - Stefan
>
>