Traceroute maximum hop limit??

[KATTUBAVA E.S]

Hi Experts,

I could see traceroute is using maximum hop of 30, What will happen when we traceroute to destination which is 40 hops away in the internet cloud? Will traceroute complete successfully in this scenario?

Thanks

-bava

[Mark Malone]

You should really be able to hit any destination within 30 hops  unless its some obscure international destination , if you r getting ***s in your traceroute something's probably wrong but there are ways to trace further than the 30 hops by setting the max hops you want

On MS windows use tracert -h and specify the hops max you want to allow

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/ip-routed-protocols/22826-traceroute.html

[KATTUBAVA E.S]

Thanks Mark.

Having one more question regarding Traceroute, While using traceroute for some destination I could see *** in the middle hops and the traceroute getting completed successfuly with endhost ip. What could be the reason for ***s in the middle??

[Mark Malone · Accepted solution]

They can be legitimate as some providers may not allow tracing through there networks for security reasons or secondly you could be going through an MPLS provider network which will not reply to icmp/trace by default as P routers don't use ip headers or TTL values in core MPLS