Tracert - quick question

TheBrooder

TheBrooder

TheBrooder

Soldato
Joined
8 Jan 2007
Posts
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Location
Cognac, France
When you do a tracert is the first hop always your modem/router?

The reason I ask is because we're having internet problems (can't send email through outlook) and when I run a tracert to the mail server or any other site the first 2 hops timeout but if I ping or tracert my router ip it's fine
 
The first hop should always be your default gateway or configured proxy server (when tracing web addresses for example).

The general exception to this would be if you have configured manual routes in your operating system's routing table.
 
R4z0r said:
Probably because whatever device is your next-hop is not responding to the traceroute. This is usually caused by a firewall.
Click to expand...

And since its happening on your first hop I'd suspect that you have a modem connecting you directly to your ISP - hence the 1st hop there is a firewall interface.
 
You need to understand what traceroute does first.
Windows tracert sends a series of ping requests to a destination address by starting with a Time to Live (TTL) of 1 and incrementing it. The TTL is an IP field that is reduced by 1 by each router the packet passes through, when it reaches zero, the packet is discarded and a Time Exceeded message is sent by the router back to the source. By looking at the address each message comes from, tracert gets the address of each router hop until the TTL allows the request to reach the end and you finally get a ping reply.

The first address should be your default gateway/router. Your ADSL modem is normally a bridge so if you're connected to that, the first address is a router beyond that. If you're not getting responses then it could be a firewall but since you're getting some it could be the equipment is not set up to generate messages - they will have more important things to process. If you're getting responses sometimes then there could be packet loss, otherwise no responses from some hops all the time would be normal.

If it's just mail issues you're having then you're looking a a different problem.
 
Does the livebox have a built in firewall which could be stopping my outgoing email (from my own mailserver/website) but allowing incoming, does that sound feasible?

Edit:

I just discovered something. In the 'system statistics' section of the router I noticed a number of errors: -

In receives 441629
In errors 4850
In unknown protocols 0
Forwarded datagrams 0
Out requests 97262
Out discards 0
Out no routes 4850


These increment when I fail to send an email.

Out of interest would this indicate that some emails are having trouble coming into my inbox and would it stop webmail from receiving emails too?
 
Last edited:
What are you trying to send mail via - IIRC Orange block all SMTP sessions that aren't going to their SMTP server.
Which values increments? Doing anything with the connection is obviously going to increase the number of packets going in and out, but the number of packets the router can't find a router for shouldn't be changing...
 
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