Our trainer was explaining something (the tracert command) but I didn’t understand it because his explanation didn’t seem to make sense.
Could you clarify? To properly understand how traceroute works one would need to know about the TTL field in the IP header (and how it’s normally decremented by routers) and the ICMP TTL Exceeded message. But I’m not sure that a tech support drone would be expected to understand any of these.
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.
Could you clarify? To properly understand how traceroute works one would need to know about the TTL field in the IP header (and how it’s normally decremented by routers) and the ICMP TTL Exceeded message. But I’m not sure that a tech support drone would be expected to understand any of these.
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.