This may be stupid but..

Mon Nov 10 11:52:02 UTC 2003

>>talking about ICMP echos with varying TTL and routers sending back
>>ICMP echo-replies. I wanted to end the interview and hire him on the

>If that would be the criteria, wouldn´t the acceptable answer involve 
>UDP packets and
>ICMP time exceeded? (not counting windows way of doing traceroute)

Little details like that can be sorted out later by education.
In fact, the individual that I'm thinking of may have mentioned
UDP packets. The point is that the answer shows the kind of
detailed understanding of the network that you want in a 
network engineer. This guy wasn't just a user of tools that
do stuff, he understood what was happening inside the network
layers themselves. 

There are lots of people who know how to use traceroute or
Infovista but you wouldn't want them logging into your core
routers for troubleshooting.

--Michael Dillon