I did read the man pages on this and got basically what you said out of them.
Yep, sometimes painful, but always useful.
Thus the numbers are the round trip times for each probe. If you wish <<
To me this means the first hop would return a small number, the second would be a larger number, and the third even larger, etc. I often see numbers that are further downstream come back significantly lower than the ones that are closer. I guess this has to do with both the random nature of the values and the fact (if I am understanding this) generating the TTL error might take longer than passing the packet.
Yes indeed.
traceroute tells me how long between the time the ICMP leaves home and the time it comes back.
Actually when the UDP packet leaves home and when the ICMP-based error comes back, but close enough. The random nature is due to taking a 'snapshot' of the highly dynamic Internet.
a closer router may not process it's TTL error as quickly as a downstream router.
This second factor has to do with the nature of routers. Most any router or routing agent exists on a multitasking machine which has many many needs to attend to. Sending TTL errors is a rather low priority as compared with routing valid packets along. Thus this is the kind of task which is scheduled at low priorities and only completed when the system is 'idle'. In fact, some router's won't send this error at all, and you'll see entries in your traceroute like so: 13 * * * How frustrating! Happy hacking, -josh -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e