Subject: Difference Between Traceroute Packet and a Ping Packet

From: Mohit Mathur <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 17:35:31 +0530

Hi,
Can anybody tell me if their is a difference between the packets sent by
"Traceroute" and the packets sent by "Ping". If yes, is their any RFC in
which this is specified??

Regards
Mohit

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From: Miguel Angel Rodriguez Jodar <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 16:29:50 +0100 (GMT+0100)

AFAIK, packets sent by ping are actually ICMP echo request packets.
Traceroute packets can, in theory, be any kind of routable packets (they
are generally UDP packets or even ICMP packets) in which the TTL
field is being increased (up to 30?) packet by packet, because in
traceroute the usefull information is given by routers as they discard
packets that have not enough TTL to pass through them.
Hope this helps...

--
Miguel Angel Rodriguez Jodar | http://icaro.fie.us.es
Area de Arquitectura y Tecnologia de Computadores
Universidad de Sevilla