<br>Several times I have been told that the packet loss I am seeing is not actually occuring at the hops that Ping Plotter is showing in its graphs. Rather, the packet loss is occuring somewhere else on the return route which is different than the forward route. How can I get pingplotter to show the return route, which would then show me where the loss is actually occuring at?<br><br>Thanks!<br><br><br>Thanks!<br><br><br>

This does, indeed, happen, and is called "asynchronous routing" - or when the route in one direction doesn't match the route in the other direction. Unfortunately, it's most of impossible to determine the return route from a server without having something running on (or near) that server to determine the problem.<br><br>In some cases, you might find that the server you're tracing to allows you to log on to a page someplace on that server and run a trace route (this would be a text trace route) from that server back to you. This will allow you to see the return route - although not with Ping Plotter (at present, there is no way to get this data into Ping Plotter so it can graph the return route).<br><br>Does the server you care about running a service like this? The administrator of that site can likely tell you that. Also, the administrator for that site might be able to run a manual trace route as well - and send you the results of that.<br><br>If you're not experiencing a problem with a *specific* server, but a wide range of servers, then you could find one of the publicly available servers that allow you to trace back to your computer. You can trace from Ping Plotter to that server, and then use the facilities of that server to trace back to you to see both sides of the route. A partial list of servers that offer this service is here: <A HREF="http://www.ispworld.com/Find_Backbone.htm" target="_new">http://www.ispworld.com/Find_Backbone.htm</A>.<br><br>Of course, being able to do a trace route in a reverse direction isn't going to give you a lot of long-term performance data with packet loss over a period of time - but it will give you an idea of the return route, and can possibly show you some packet loss. If you control the server at the other end, of course you can run Ping Plotter on that server, or use some other utility to get the return route.<br><br>Unfortunately, this is a weakness of trace route (and Ping Plotter) - in that there is no general mechanism for determining the return route.<br><br><br>

Thanks for the reply and info Pete! Good suggestions as always!<br><br><br>