Skip to content

Run traceroute

If you have a Magic WAN client connected through GRE , IPsec , CNI or WARP and want to perform a traceroute to an endpoint behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, the following settings must be applied for the command to return useful information.

Inherited TTL value

On the machine where the traceroute client is executed, make sure the tunnel device does not inherit the TTL value of the inner packet. This is the default behavior on Linux and can result in unhelpful traceroute results:

Terminal window
sudo traceroute -s 10.1.0.100 -I 10.3.0.100
traceroute to 10.3.0.100 (10.3.0.100), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 * * *
2 * * *
3 * * *
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 10.3.0.100 (10.3.0.100) 420.505 ms 420.779 ms 420.776 ms

Setting the TTL explicitly returns much better results:

Terminal window
sudo ip link set cf_gre type gre ttl 64
sudo traceroute -s 10.1.0.100 -I 10.3.0.100
traceroute to 10.3.0.100 (10.3.0.100), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 10.0.0.11 (10.0.0.11) 58.947 ms 58.933 ms 58.930 ms
2 173.245.60.175 (173.245.60.175) 61.138 ms 61.316 ms 61.313 ms
3 172.68.145.21 (172.68.145.21) 367.448 ms 367.532 ms 367.530 ms
4 mplat-e2e-vm3.c.magic-transit.internal (10.152.0.20) 370.362 ms 370.440 ms 370.522 ms
5 10.3.0.100 (10.3.0.100) 370.519 ms 370.541 ms 518.152 ms

WARP client

Some Linux distributions default to a very strict setting for reverse path filtering. This strict setting attempts to drop fake traffic as a security measure. Performing a traceroute with this setting on can unintentionally drop traceroute packets. If you use WARP on Linux, set a less strict policy before attempting to perform a traceroute:

Terminal window
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.CloudflareWARP.rp_filter=2
net.ipv4.conf.CloudflareWARP.rp_filter = 2
Terminal window
sudo traceroute -s 172.16.0.2 -I 10.3.0.100
traceroute to 10.3.0.100 (10.3.0.100), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 169.254.21.171 (169.254.21.171) 48.887 ms 48.894 ms 48.620 ms
2 173.245.60.175 (173.245.60.175) 49.403 ms 49.519 ms 49.603 ms
3 172.68.65.7 (172.68.65.7) 357.499 ms 357.519 ms 357.520 ms
4 mplat-e2e-vm3.c.magic-transit.internal (10.152.0.20) 360.024 ms 360.086 ms 360.078 ms
5 10.3.0.100 (10.3.0.100) 360.283 ms 360.297 ms 360.489 ms