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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

> Traceroute, as far as the industry is concerned, does not exist.

> Look it up. There is no RFC. There are no ports for traceroute, no rules in firewalls to accommodate it, no best practices for network operators. Why is that?

I know this is getting into semantics but this argument is ridiculous. Everything that isn’t explicitly specified in an RFC and has its own protocol doesn’t exist to the industry? Who thinks like that? It’s using behavior of the system to get a result, how does that mean it doesn’t exist? If I do a Speedtest by sending traffic over the internet, does my program not exist because there is no SpeedTest Protocol with its own port, and no RFC has ever been written about it?

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>That's the situation where you, a gay leftist, go to Thanksgiving dinner with the family, and a shitty uncle sits across from you and begins telling lies about society, about people of color, about gay marriage, and so on.

Kinda checks out?

Anyone who's ever used traceroute knows that quite a few routers won't reply. It's still the best available tool to figure out a bunch of problems.

Huh, I guess they edited that part out.

Because I can’t edit: I just saw that RFC 4443 explicitly mentions traceroute when describing how ICMPv6 rate limiting should be implemented, so while there is no explicit RFC describing traceroute, it is mentioned and accommodated.

RFC 4884 also has mentions traceroute.

Edit: and perhaps the worst thing in the blog: it looks like for ICMPv6 (RFC 4443), Packet Too Big error messages are actually MUST now, so every implementation needs to send them.

Yeah, it's like the only "existing" or "correct" use of a protocol is that which is explicitly plnned for bythe authors.. No, yeah, that's not useful.

Speedtest similarly does not exist. Junior engineers holding it wrong will misinterpret the results. Yet it can provide actionable and valuable information.

As for "it's too complicated to wrap your head around": It appears the OPs major issue is people around them not understanding that "absence of confirmation is not confirmation of absence". I don't think the issue is actually complexity.

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