To properly understand how traceroute works one would need
to know about the TTL field
I did learn about this on my own that day, but the original
confusion was at a quite different level: I asked whether
the times on each line measured the distance between that
router and the previous one, or between that router and the
source. His answer: “Both.” A charitable interpretation
of this would be “They measure round trip times between the
source and that router, but it’s just a matter of arithmetic
to use those to estimate round trip times between any two
routers in the list”—but I asked him if this was what he
meant and he said no. We went back and forth for a while
until he told me to just research it myself.
Edit: I think I remember him saying something like “You’re expecting it to be logical, but things aren’t always logical”.
Jesus Christ. “Things aren’t always logical.” The hallmark of a magic-thinker. Of course everything is always logical. The only case it doesn’t seem that way is when one lacks understanding.
I did learn about this on my own that day, but the original confusion was at a quite different level: I asked whether the times on each line measured the distance between that router and the previous one, or between that router and the source. His answer: “Both.” A charitable interpretation of this would be “They measure round trip times between the source and that router, but it’s just a matter of arithmetic to use those to estimate round trip times between any two routers in the list”—but I asked him if this was what he meant and he said no. We went back and forth for a while until he told me to just research it myself.
Edit: I think I remember him saying something like “You’re expecting it to be logical, but things aren’t always logical”.
Jesus Christ. “Things aren’t always logical.” The hallmark of a magic-thinker. Of course everything is always logical. The only case it doesn’t seem that way is when one lacks understanding.