How is prioritizing any different from loss?
That’s an excellent question. The reason is that both ping and traceroute use a special packet type called an Internet Control Message Protocol or ICMP packet. These are used primarily for network attached devices to send short messages to each other and as such are very different from transport protocols such as UDP or TCP, which is what ‘real data’ such as web pages or video downloads use. As more computers moved from temporary connections such as dialup to permanent connections as we have today, it became common for virus and trojan writers to include a mechanism to search for nearby hosts via ping in an attempt to locate more systems to infect. The net sum of having to manage this additional flood of ICMP packets was that routers, firewalls and other network devices could become so busy responding to pings that they were rendered ineffective at actually sending real traffic…what is known as a denial of service attack. This is why it is now common practice for engineers to setup t
