Walking with Packets: Traceroute Through MPLS Cloud
Think about this for a minute: An MPLS network with a two Provider Edge (PE) routers and some Provider (P) routers. The P routers have no VRFs configured on them and therefore have no routes whatsoever for any of the customer networks. A customer then does a traceroute from one of their sites, across the MPLS cloud, and into one of their other sites. The traceroute output shows the P routers as hops along the path.
How is it possible for the P routers to reply to the traceroute if they don’t have routes back to the customer network?
The Lab Setup
Here’s the network:
Here’s the traceroute output from R21’s loopback0 to R8’s loopback0 (the last octet of each IP address corresponds to the name of each router):
R21#traceroute 10.1.8.8 source loopback0
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 10.1.8.8
VRF info: (vrf in name/id, vrf out name/id)
1 10.4.4.4 21 msec 18 msec 17 msec
2 10.2.45.5 [MPLS: Labels 21/24 Exp 0] 19 msec 18 msec 18 msec
3 10.2.15.1 [MPLS: Labels 21/24 Exp Continue reading