Quote:
Originally Posted by iaskwhy
That's mostly right, but what it fails to recognize is that the path will ONLY change if state changes in the route. If you have a router that's flapping, you'll see packets drop more often than change to a different path in the middle of a tcp session. The packets may hit different routers along the way, but more often than not they're two routers sharing a route in a high-availability cluster, using the same set of rules - therefore, the end point on the path is going to be the same either way.
OCCASIONALLY, you'll see problems where packets don't end up in the same place when sent from the same location. This CAN be DNS based load balancing (Yahoo and Google do it, for example), but for sites like flashkit.com , there's one IP address ( 63.236.18.42 ), and a single best route from your location to that IP based on BGP announcements from their routers.
