Access to the Internic Blocked

Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 18:04:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu

You forgot to point out that his evidence below indicates that this is
an MCI problem in Washington. Besides the fact that Network Solutions
isn't anyone's provider...

Let us be more careful here. The traceroute only indicates that the
problem was with the hop after border7.wtn.mci.net. The traceroute
simply does not contain sufficient information to pinpoint which
party the next hop is.

In fact, the next hop is the Internic router (204.70.77.42):

[foghorn] enke% traceroute 198.41.0.6
traceroute to 198.41.0.6 (198.41.0.6), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 cpe1-ethernet1-1 (204.70.133.1) 4 ms 2 ms 2 ms
2 borderx1-fddi-2.Reston.mci.net (204.70.176.101) 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms
3 core1-hssi-3.Greensboro.mci.net (204.70.1.161) 11 ms 11 ms 10 ms
4 core2-aip-4.Greensboro.mci.net (204.70.1.22) 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms
5 core2-hssi-3.Washington.mci.net (204.70.1.130) 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms
6 border7-fddi-0.Washington.mci.net (204.70.74.51) 19 ms 19 ms 29 ms
7 network-solutions.Washington.mci.net (204.70.77.42) 22 ms 140 ms 209 ms
8 rs1.internic.net (198.41.0.6) 21 ms 21 ms 21 ms

As Mark Koster has pointed out, it was a routing problem with the
return traffic from Internic and it was not related to MCI.

Hope this helps in clarifying the issue.

-- Enke

> > According to my traceroute, I see that they get filtered out at
> > network-solutions which is your provider. Will you be able to assist?
> > Thanks...

> > traceroute to rs.internic.net (198.41.0.6), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
> > 1 eth-3.gw-4.hck.idt.net (169.132.32.254) 2.907 ms 2.026 ms 3.068 ms
> > 2 eth-0.gw-1.hck.idt.net (169.132.34.250) 107.054 ms 121.335 ms 77.0

12 ms

> > 3 10.255.255.1 (10.255.255.1) 82.342 ms 70.764 ms *
> > 4 192.41.177.181 (192.41.177.181) 55.270 ms 48.858 ms 42.972 ms
> > 5 core2-hssi2-0.Washington.mci.net (204.70.1.213) 40.422 ms 40.915 ms
  
> > 43.822 ms
> > 6 border7-fddi-0.Washington.mci.net (204.70.74.51) 33.906 ms 78.689 m

s

Very true. That fact and the widespread use of assymetric return paths (as
in this case) really makes it impossible to authoritatively diagnose who
is at fault when a routing problem occurs merely by reading a few
traceroutes.

One thing that would help diagnose the true source of the problem with
less human interaction required (avoiding voicemail and all that) would be
wider public access to traceroutes beginning at key sites. There is a
group of ISP's who make CGI-based traceroutes available from their sites
at http://amazing.netaxs.com/internet/club-traceroute.html

In this instance, it would have helped if the Internic had a CGI
traceroute available from their site but I think it would also be a nice
thing if the major NSP's would make this same kind of facility available
from their exchange points.

What do you folks think?

Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com