RE: Packet Loss

[Karyn Ulriksen <kulriksen () publichost com>]

Isn't there something in RFC 1149 or RFC 2549 about this?  Maybe another
update to these RFC will be required.

K

Reference:  
http://www.valkaryn.net/rfc/1149.txt
http://www.valkaryn.net/rfc/2549.txt


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony Rall [mailto:trall () almaden ibm com]
> Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2000 9:50 AM
> To: nanog () merit edu
> Subject: Re: Packet Loss
>
>
>
>
> > I'll speculate that it occurs when packets destined for a 
> destination do
> > not get there.  Most people see it via dropped ping packets..
>
> What ping really tells you is that either the packets from A 
> to B are being
> lost or those from B to A are being lost.  From the 
> information that ping
> presents there is no way to know which direction (and the 
> routing may well
> be asymmetric) is choking, nor if the problem is at one of 
> the end points.
>
> While I really like to use pings (with at least 100 samples) 
> for testing
> round trip packet loss, there are situations where it will 
> give incorrect
> results.  If the packet loss is data, packet size, or 
> protocol dependent,
> ping probably won't tell you about the performance to be 
> expected for the
> application that you're really interested in.  On top of 
> that, some systems
> will filter or throttle ICMP - this really distorts the results.
>
> Tony Rall