Identifying a distant network Packet loss

Question

Hi,

I have access on the server side. My clients are facing packet loss when they connect to my server.

How I calculate the packet loss is by counting the number of packets re-transmitted. Can someone tell me how can I identify which hop to the client has the packet loss?

Any help in this case is highly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Can someone tell me how can I identify which hop to the client has the packet loss?

In most environments you can't.

Imagine this:

Client -- R1 --- R2 ---* R3 ---* R4 --- R5 ---R6 -- Server

If R3 or R4 is overloaded and drops a frame, it won't inform you in any way about the dropped frame, so there is no way to figure out if R3 or R4 (or any other router) dropped the frame, unless you are able to capture traffic in front and after the router, which is (probably) possible in an enterprise environment, but certainly impossible on the internet

Client -- R1 --- R2 --- R3 --- R4 --- R5 ---R6 -- Server
                     |      |
                     |      |
                 capture  capture

Regards
Kurt