Networking issues

[RW]

On Sun, 8 Jun 2008 20:19:04 -0600
Andrew Falanga <af300wsm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I have, for some time, been able to ssh into my father's FreeBSD
> machine in the Road Runner network in Central New York.  Last night,
> I tried so that I could fix a problem for him and ssh timed out.  No
> problem I thought, his modem has a different IP than the one I have
> in my /etc/hosts file, but this turned to not be the case.
> 
> Well, after some digging, I did a traceroute to his IP address.  The
> packets went all over the place, from San Jose, to Colorado, back to
> San Jose, to Colorado then to Ohio, then to Denver, then to San Jose,
> then to Ohio, etc. (you get the idea). 

This is not necessarily wrong, I used to have a dialup account where
connections within the UK would go often go to London, then go round a
tour of Western Europe, and then come back through London. Although
there probably is a fault in your case since you can't connect.

> First, my DSL modems IP is 71.221.172.38, however, the default route
> appears to be 67.41.38.201.  

I think Point-to-Point links just work like that, with arbitrary
addresses on either end of the link. My address and gateway have only
the first byte in common.

> [/usr/home/andy]
> -> traceroute -n 67.41.38.201
> traceroute to 67.41.38.201 (67.41.38.201), 64 hops max, 52 byte
> packets 1  * * *
>  2  67.41.38.201  40.303 ms *  39.421 ms
> 
> Why on earth would there be delays on the first hop when not using
> name resolution?

I don't see what name resolution has to do with the delay,  the 39ms is
the round-trip time to the gateway at the ISP.