Re: [hybi] With deflate-stream / websocket traceroute action

[John Tamplin <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 4:34 AM, Andy Green <[e-mail]> wrote:

> In fact you can do traceroute just with PING / PONG if the standard allowed
> for
>
>  1) PONG MAY contain additional text after the PING payload echo
>
>  2) PING MUST contain a TTL byte at the start
>
>  3) Intermediaries MAY decrement the TTL when passing on PING
>
>  4) PONG SHOULD be issued by intermediary IF TTL = 0 after the decrement
> and MUST be by the endpoint regardless of TTL
>
>  5) When PONG issued, intermediary or endpoint MAY append its ID text
>

I am not sure how useful it would be if all these are MAY's -- in particular
the TTL seems useless if you don't require that it be decremented at each
hop.

However, requiring this would be complicate some simple intermediaries
dramatically -- I don't know if the value gained is worth anything.  Also,
there would seem to be a problem exposing this to JS -- you wouldn't want
hostile JS to be able to get a layout of the network behind the firewall.

What does this gain over using ICMP or UDP-based traceroute?

-- 
John A. Tamplin
Software Engineer (GWT), Google