Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-durand-ipv6-traceroute-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 1997 10:24:43 -0500

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title		: IPv6 traceroute option
	Author(s)	: A. Durand
	Filename	: draft-durand-ipv6-traceroute-00.txt
	Pages		: 4
	Date		: 21-Nov-97
	
The traceroute program has proven very useful and has been
    extensively used in the Internet for measurement and debugging
    purposes. However, it only shows the originator to target path
    and gives no indication on the reverse path. Source routing may
    sometimes be used to find it, but it's very often disable by
    intermediary routers.
    Another problem occurs when packets do not follow the same routes:
    traceroute outputs are very difficult to read.
 
    Other solutions has been proposed to record the route taken by
    an IPv4 packet. Originally, IPv4 contains an option in which every
    intermediary router can add its address [RFC791]. Unfortunately,
    the limitation in size imposed by the options design of IPv4 limits
    its use to 9 routers.
 
    In [RFC1393] another strategy was proposed. An new IPv4 option was
    created. When a router receives a packet containing this option,
    it generates a ICMP Echo message to the source. This technique
    couldn't be widely deployed in IPv4 because it needed a change
    in every single router to be efficient.
 
    These two methods create less traffic on the network and are more
    accurate, since they give the real route taken by packets and are
    less sensitive to fluttering. The IPv6 deployment could be the
    opportunity to widely deploy a new traceroute mechanism based on
    those two methods.
 
    We propose to combine the two previous methods by defining a new
    hop-by-hop option and a new ICMP message type to record the direct
    path from the originator to the target and the reverse path from
    the target to the originator.

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