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Hosting and Traceroute Question

by I.M.Retired
3 replies
I have websites hosted on 2 different servers. This morning I did a traceroute on one server and got the results fairly quickly. It reported 18 paths then completed the transaction.

The site I have hosted on another site got to 18 paths then started adding *** on 19, 20, 21 etc., and just kept on doing this until I finally quit the test after letting it run for 5 minutes.

Can anyone explain why this happened? My website loads okay on the site that was not completing the traceroute. But someone in Europe contacted me and said they couldn't access the site.

I did a traceroute on a hosting company that I am thinking about using - it completed the information very quickly.

I'm curious and concerned about why it stalled on one of my hosts. I also checked a friend's domain who is using the same hosting provider and the same thing happens.

(I used the Mac utility Terminal to do the traceroute.)
#hosting #question #traceroute
  • Profile picture of the author kmckillop
    It's quite possible along the path those routers/firewalls have disabled ICMP packets, which are used to respond to traceroute requests but are not used when requesting a website. So it's very possible that you cannot 'ping' or use 'traceroute' to a particular host, but you can make an http connection to them no problem at all.

    No much you can do if that's the case.
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    • Profile picture of the author xiaophil
      Traceroute usage can be an indication of nefarious intentions, and many networks disable it in one way or another.

      You could try increasing the timeout on probe response, which usually defaults to around 5 seconds, using the -w switch, e.g -w 10 (or more).

      Also, you can pick up the probe from the last known good one using the -M switch.

      So maybe try something like:

      traceroute -w 10 -M 17 hostname

      There are other options like trying different packet protocols, but it gets a bit complicated.

      The other thing to remember is that IP doesn't guarantee that all the packets will use the same route, even from the same source, and of course someone in Europe will have a completely different route to yourself.

      Cheers,
      Phil
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  • Profile picture of the author Steve Powers
    Well,just as the two guys upstairs said,it's probably that the admistrator has disabled ICMP packet so that it can be more secure.Since you can visit the website,what are you worrying about?If you really want to find out what happened,I think you'd better leran more knowledge on server and network protocols.
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