Friday 19 June 2015

JunOS Traceroute Error Codes

The other day I was getting a strange result on a traceroute I ran from a Juniper MX router (!S), so I decided to Google what that meant. Strangely enough, it proved pretty difficult to find  - there doesn't seem to be anything in the Juniper knowledge base article about response codes and nobody seems to have written anything about what !S means in blogs.

Eventually I got to the bottom of it by searching for some of the other error / response codes that JunOS traceroutes throw out. It turns out that JunOS traceroute "has some commonalities" with BSD traceroute, including the error / response codes. I guess a lot of the code is probably borrowed :)

So, to paraphrase the BSD manpages, here are some response codes you could expect to see in the wild:

!H - Received Host Unreachable
!N - Received Network Unreachable
!P - Received Protocol Unreachable (host doesn't understand UDP?)
!S - Source routing failed
!M - MTU Exceeded
!A - Communication with destination network admin prohibited (usually Cisco router ACL)
!Z - Communication with destination host admin prohibited
!X - Communication administratively prohibited

And here are some far less likely ones:

!U - Destination network unknown
!W - Destination host unknown
!I - Host is isolated
!Q - Destination network unreachable for this ToS
!T - Destination host unreachable for this ToS
!V - Host precedence violation
!C - Precedence cutoff in effect
!<num> - Gives the ICMP unreachable code number for an unrecognised response

I've not verified some of these, I think my next little project will be a scapy script to generate each possible unreachable response so I can see how the Juniper displays it. I'm also not sure why the MX was trying to source route its traceroute packets. To be fair I was telling it to override the routing table when sending but I didn't think that would cause it to source route. I'll do a bit more investigation into that and post the results if anything interesting emerges.

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