Slow upload to Apple. Traceroute ****s at 2nd hop

[animalsnumerals]

We've been using iTunes Producer to send files to iTunes. The problem is, the uploads are painfully slow and peppered with timeouts.

We have an iMac connected (by ethernet) to a BT router. Google, the BBC, Slashdot, and a host of other sites that I thought of off the top of my head pinged fine and gave pleasing results when using traceroute.

Apple.com and cnn.com, however, will not play along. Both will only return the ping once and traceroute fails at the second hop. Why should this be?

We have no firewalls installed. I tried changing the DNS settings to openDNS but got no improvement.

This is probably one of those obvious things. What's the problem?

[lolafuertes]

The * came because the pinged address does not answers to the ECHO command.
This way, many routers or destination addresses are hidden and reduce the exposition to a DOS attack.

By IP design, when you reply to an ECHO, you 'shoud' receive an AK as the ECHO originator has received your answer. If not, after a short time, you must retry your message until a defined number of not responses. In this way, if some one asks for the ECHO but never aknowledges your answer, you got a lot of unuseful work.

Unig this 'feature by design' some attackers send lots of ECHO commands but never send the AK and you went overhelmed by the extra work until a DOS.

Hope this helps

[animalsnumerals]

So what you're saying is that, in this case, ping and traceroute are useless as diagnostic tools as Apple's server is not playing the same game?

[lolafuertes]

Yes