How Do I Tell...

[Patches1]

How do I tell if I am losing packets when using the DOS prompt
tracert, versus Pingplotter?

I've had Comcast over to the house and showed them 3 months of PingPlot data which reveals horrendous loss of packets from the Seattle Savvis hub, through Chicago, through St.Louis...and Comcast says they don't recognise PingPlot Data and state that they only recognise windows data via tracert. Comcast says that they have traced my route and show that I am not losing any packets between me and HTC.

So....of course....I asked them about Savvis and they had no idea about Savvis....and said I had no packet losses.

So..ok...will someone please give me a lesson in TRACERT 101 interpretaion so that I can also disclaim a third party (PingPlotter)
as being inept?

[Skuzzy]

You can save PingPlot data as a text file and it will look like a traceroute.

To use the DOS traceroute, got to Start->Run, then type in "command" and press OK.

At the prompt, type "tracert 216.91.187.39" and press .

Select the screen data with your mouse, then press the "Copy" button.  You can then open Notepad or Wordpad and paste the ata into it and save it as a text file for emailing to your ISP.

[StarOfAfrica2]

Yeah but he's asking how to tell from the output of a DOS tracert if he has packet loss or not.  His cable company doesnt recognize the pingplotter data, they only use tracert.  

I dont think you CAN tell packet loss via tracert can you?  It just gives ping results AFAIK.



Heres a link to a little explanation on how tracert works.  This post jogged my memory, had it in my bookmarks.

http://mappa.mundi.net/maps/maps_004/index.html



Ok, I got my curiousity up, and did a bit of digging.  Apparently you CAN determine a lost packet, through missing outbound hop counts.  Seems a bit weird to me, Since pingplotter and other plotting programs show a % of packet loss at a hop.  This seems more absolute, either you had a lost packet or not.  I'm guessing tracert only tried with one packet, where pingplotter bombards the route with packets over and over.  Anyway, here's a writeup on tracert thats a bit more technical than the mappa mundi site.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1393.html