mturoute: ping-mode output

Jeff West has asked me to document the printout produced by the mturoute utility. Here's the first part of the documentation.

mturoute works in two modes:
  • Without the -t flag, it sends variable-lenght ICMP echo packets to the specified destination address, trying to figure out the largest packet that is successfully propagated to the destination.
  • With the -t flag, it uses traceroute-like algorithm to find the hop-by-hop IP addresses (the source IP addresses of the ICMP TTL exceeded replies) and uses the same packet-size-calculating algorithm to measure the path MTU to each hop.

Today we'll focus on the non-trace mode. It tries to measure the path MTU with a bisection method varying the packet sizes between minimum MTU (92) and maximum MTU (specified with the -m parameter, default is 10000 bytes). The payload size of the first packet (without the -m flag) is thus 5046 bytes ((10000 + 92)/2).

On each iteration, the algorithm prints a “cryptic” sign indicating whether the ping with the current payload size succeeded. The following indications are given:

  • '+': ICMP echo reply arrived
  • '-': The ping failed (for various reasons, including exceeding the path MTU)
  • 'u': ICMP destination unreachable response arrived, indicating blackhole or access-list.
  • ICMP unreachable is considered a successful response; at least we're measuring the path MTU up to the failure point

  • '.': timeout. The ping will be retried up to three times (or the number specified with the -r option).
In the ping mode, mturoute prints the current ICMP payload size at each step, resulting in a printout similar to the one below. If you'd have specified the -d option, the printout would include detailed status codes from the IcmpSendEcho function.
$ mturoute 10.0.3.3
* ICMP Fragmentation is not permitted. *
* Maximum payload is 10000 bytes. *
- ICMP payload of 5046 bytes failed..
- ICMP payload of 2569 bytes failed..
+ ICMP payload of 1330 bytes succeeded.
- ICMP payload of 1949 bytes failed..
- ICMP payload of 1639 bytes failed..
- ICMP payload of 1484 bytes failed..
+ ICMP payload of 1407 bytes succeeded.
- ICMP payload of 1445 bytes failed..
+ ICMP payload of 1426 bytes succeeded.
+ ICMP payload of 1435 bytes succeeded.
+ ICMP payload of 1440 bytes succeeded.
+ ICMP payload of 1442 bytes succeeded.
+ ICMP payload of 1443 bytes succeeded.
+ ICMP payload of 1444 bytes succeeded.
+ ICMP payload of 1444 bytes succeeded.
Path MTU: 1472 bytes.

Note: To use the debug-enabled version of mturoute, or the version that does not need VC++ runtime, download the new ZIP archive from my web site.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks! Just copied mturoute to my swiss army notebook ;)
  2. Mmm, just did some little testing and found that it would be very nice to overrride OS MTU. My IBM X60 is preinstalled with Win XP pro and full set of IBM branded drivers and somehow it has MTU set to 1300 for all interfaces. So I cant really test MTU over hops without changing windows MTU with regedit.
  3. Can't do. I have to send out packets with DF bit set, otherwise the path MTU discovery is not triggered at all. If the packet has the DF bit set and its size is greater than the outgoing interface MTU or the dynamic MTU discovered for the target host (more about that when I do some more tests and write the post about how the path MTU discovery really works), it's rejected by the IP stack internally (with the PACKET TOO BIG error).
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