With traceroute-1.4a12-XX the -F argument is used to avoid intra-switch fragmentation. From traceroute(8) manpage:
...
-F Set the "don’t fragment" bit.
...
When ‘-F’ is specified the traceroute fails to get connected. Even with localhost:
# traceroute -r -F 127.0.0.1
traceroute to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1), 30 hops max, 46 byte packets
1 * * *
2 * * *
3 * * *
...
...
Without ‘-F’ it works just fine:
# traceroute -r 127.0.0.1
traceroute to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1), 30 hops max, 46 byte packets
1 localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 0.629 ms 0.032 ms 0.021 ms
There is a bug with the IP_DF (don’t fragment flag) in the traceroute-1.4a12 implementation.
The traceroute had been rewritten from scratch and been ported to OEL5
starting with 1.0.3 (and as of November 27, 2008 the latest is
traceroute-2.0.1-3.el5 on OEL5) and that series do not have such a
problem.
The old traceroute-1.4a12 series are not maintained anymore in favor of the new traceroute (The one from http://sourceforge.net/projects/traceroute)
With traceroute-1.4a12 series do not use the ‘-F’ argument for traceroute. If it
is crucial to have the functionality, only for 2.6 kernels it is still possible to download the latest source tarball from http://sourceforge.net/projects/traceroute (2.0.12 as of November 27, 2008) and build it on the distribution.
traceroute-1.4a12 source from – ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/
latest traceroute source from – http://sourceforge.net/projects/traceroute
