Ten Technologies Every Network Engineer Should Know - #6 Traceroute

Dear Traceroute,
Hello my dear friend. It's been a while since we last spoke but I was digging around in a packet trace today and saw you there so I thought I'd drop you a line. Things are great here. Summer is finally starting to wind down a bit and I'm gearing up for duck season. I think the last time we spoke, I was troubleshooting a connectivity issue between two of my WAN sites and you helped me determine which path the traffic was taking and where it was being blocked. I tell you, I'm not sure I could've worked through this without you. Thanks.

Remember that time we were trying to get VoIP turned up in our Singapore office and about half the time the call quality was so bad that we couldn't understand each other? I was really beating my head against the wall (literally) until you suggested we send a stream of UDP packets with ascending TTLs along the path to see identify all of the hops and then measure jitter to each of them separately to see where things were getting choked. I never would've guessed that it was the firewall here in the datacenter. I definitely owe you a beer or two for that one dude.

BTW, I heard that you're now working with Cisco to offer functionality in their IP SLA features. Gotta love that. What are they paying you? We just added support for the ICMP Path Echo and ICMP Path Jitter to our Orion IP SLA Manager - couldn't have done it without you man.

Anyhow, drop me a line sometime. I know you're busy hopping all over the place but I miss chatting with ya. When's the next time you're routing thru Austin?

Sincerely,
Josh
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