Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!BBN.COM!brescia From: brescia@BBN.COM (Mike Brescia) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Do Butterflies Live Forever? Message-ID: <8903181913.AA20374@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 18 Mar 89 17:35:45 GMT References: <8903140236.aa11253@SPARK.BRL.MIL> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 42 If you run traceroute through the Buttergates in the core, you will notice that they do not decrement the IP TTL. This is not a very good idea. Phil Wood raised this in a msg dated 2/10, which appears not to have gotten a (broadcast) answer. The short of it is that the Butterfly gateways claim to decrement the TTL, and claim to discard packets received with TTL=0, but do not claim to avoid sending packets with TTL=0. While they do not yet conform to RFC1009 in this detail, the Butterflies will not cause a packet to live forever. If you want TTL to be a measure of 'how many gateways may touch this packet', then one with TTL=1 will pass through one gateway. I don't view this as refusing to comply with RFC1009, but attempting to explain the thinking behind the current implementation. We made our design decisions before 1009 was being discussed. In the interests of uniformity, this is the sort of detail that should be included in protocol definitions. I hope this explains your traceroute results. Mike Brescia Gateway Development Group, BBNCC ------- Forwarded Message Date: Fri, 10 Feb 89 11:17:35 MST From: "C. Philip Wood" Message-Id: <8902101817.AA03292@sneezy.lanl.gov> To: tcp-ip@sri-nic.arpa Subject: TTL Why do the "Mail bridges" not decrement the TTL? Or, do they? (on 26.0.0.90) #./traceroute ucbarpa.berkeley.edu traceroute to ucbarpa.berkeley.edu (10.0.0.78), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 UCBARPA.Berkeley.EDU (10.0.0.78) 633 ms 769 ms 595 ms # ------- End of Forwarded Message