On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 04:50:42PM -0500, Chris Wagner wrote: > At 08:33 PM 3/9/00 +0100, Paul van Empelen wrote: > >Ping will show you the TTL of the returning icmp packet. I can't tell you > >exactly what the TTL does on the iron where the ping packet will bounce. > > So each host implements it's own time-to-live for it's ICMP packets? I take > it that's the maximum time a host will wait to here a ping echo? Possibly a > way to keep hosts from waiting ad infinitum for echos and thereby hogging up > stack space.
Time to live has nothing to do with time, although the name suggests it. It is a hop count. You start at e.g. 255. On the next hop the IP packet will have a ttl of 254 and so on. Paul. PS: I won't answer my mail next week.
