: What does an asterisk/star in traceroute mean? The below is a part of traceroute to my hosted server: 9 ae-2-2.ebr2.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.132.106) 19.433 ms 19.599 ms 19.275 ms 10

@Murphy175

Arp may have timed out. I set up a test network with packetracer and got a asterisk for a destination host. I then pinged it, got a response then tracerouted again and it worked. I then noticed that the machines that were asterisking back did not have arp entries in the local router

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@Gonzalez347

Traceroute sends packets to the destination with the field "time to live" (TTL) equal to the number of hops.

Every router decreases the value of TTL of an incoming packet and if it sees an incoming packet with TTL = 0 then drops it, otherwise it decreases the value and sends it further. At the same time it sends diagnosing information to the source about router's identity.

If router does not respond within a timeout then traceroute prints an asterisk. Lines 14 and 15 show that routers which drop packets with original TTLs 14 and 15 did not respond within timeout.

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@Murray155

Another reason is that typically 3 packets are sent to each machine, and some machines will only respond to the first packet no matter what.

If the problem is just a timeout issue, you can set the -w parameter to the number of seconds you want to wait; e.g., traceroute -w 10 google.com will wait 10 seconds instead of the default of 5 seconds.

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@Sue5673885

If a packet is not acknowledged within the expected timeout, an
asterisk is displayed.


From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute
However zyzzyva.site5.com did eventually respond which is why you have line 16.

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