Pete,

Sometimes when I am investigating things, I want a ping to the target and get the graphing history, but not with a traceroute (with the TTL's expiring along the way) Is there a way to do this?

Thanks for the nifty program and have a great holiday with your family,

-Corey

Hi, Corey.

To do this, go to the View menu, Ignore First Hops, and then select the option to "Ping final hop only". This sends out packets with a high TTL - and will monitor just the destination you select (no route in between).

Thanks very much. This feature only sort of works though. If you turn it on and then switch back to all hops again, it doesn't change the list of hops to graph and all the responses fail (RED). You have to "Reset and Restart" to get it to start working again.

For what it is worth..

It does this in both 2.30.1 and 2.40 beta 1

Thanks again,

-Corey

Sorry about my anonymous response last time...

In the 2.40 beta 1 version, I'm unable to reproduce the symptoms you're talking aobut. No matter when I change my "Ignore first hops" option, things recover correctly when I change it to something else.

Can you bundle up a bit of data (if you use 2.40, you can insert some comments for me telling me when you changed modes, and what mode you changed to), and email it to [email]support@pingplotter.com?[/email] In 2.30.1, this feature wasn't always clean in the way it recovered, but in 2.40, it should be working more cleanly. In addition, it should be pinging the intermediate hops in *any* version that supports this - it's just that 2.30.1 would sometimes have a bit of packet loss reported (incorrectly) in the first sample set that came back with a full route.

Thanks!

Pete

No problem. I sometimes reply and forget to login first and end up doing the same thing.

OK, now this may be harder for you to reproduce. I tested it more to make this easier to reproduce. I think there are some special circumstances here.

I sent the files you asked for along with and explanation. It seems to have something to do with the Router/FW I am using. (A Cisco PIX) When going to regular Internet sites it works as you say it should. When going through the PIX and a VPN tunnel back to my office it does a couple of peculiar things.

One is that the first hop normally is not displayed since the PIX probably is not returning the ICMP TTL message you are expecting. (I haven't traced it just yet to see, but I think it isn't.) That is normal I should think, but the peculiar part is that PP doesn't like having the first hop behave this way when it has to switch from pinging only the last hop back to anythign else. It seems to get confused.

The second part is very strange. When I switch from Trace All to Ping Final only, the graph window retroactively paints 10 red samples in the bottom graph window. I sent the images in the Email along with the pp2 file and more explanation detail.

Enjoy,,

-Corey