TTL Expired in Transit - Reason and Solution

TTL Expired in Transit is one of the common error messages you may receive while you ping a remote host. This tutorial explains what does this error message "TTL Expired in Transit" actually mean and how to solve it. In simple words, TTL Expired in Transit tells the Time To Live value set for the ping packets reduced to zero while traveling through the network before reaching the destination. Let us check the reasons for this issue and how to fix it.

TTL value set on a packet in a way to reduce it by one when the packet passes through a hop in the network.

For example, if the Time To Live value on a packet is 3, it will pass through 3 hops. At the third hope, the TTL value reduces to become zero.

So, what happens when TTL expires? The packet will not travel to the next hop.

This procedure helps to avoid the infinite looping of packets.

Possible Reasons for TTL Expired in Transit
Let us check the reasons for receiving the ping reply TTL Expired in Transit.

1. Faulty Routing loop due to wrong network settings
   
   
2. TTL Value of a packet is set very low

How to Solve TTL Expired in Transit
To fix this issue, we need to find the reason behind this error message. The step by step solution provided in this article will help you solve this issue.

1. Use the Tracert to Check the actual location of the error
   
   The first step is to perform a tracert test and check the actual location of the error.
   
   
   • On Windows Platform
     Open the command prompt on your Windows computer. Type tracert www.corenetworkz.com and press enter button.
     
     
     
     
   • On Linux Platform
     Open the Linux terminal and type traceroute www.corenetworkz.com and press enter key.
     
   
   If you are not sure about the working of this command, you may visit the link below.
   How to Use the Tracert command
   
   
   
2. Check the Routing Table for an infinite loop
   In most of the scenarios, the reason behind receiving the TTL Expired in Transit is misconfigured router and a routing loop.
   
   We need to correct the router configuration and make sure that there is no routing loop.
   
   We can check the routing table on a computer by using the command prompt command provided below.
   
   route print
   
   
   
   This command will show the routing table stored on your PC.
   
   If you receive TTL Expired in Transit error on Cisco devices, you need to use a different command to fix it.
   
   For Cisco, the command to display the Routing table is show ip route.
   
   If you have Juniper devices on your network, you should use show route table command.
   
   You need to delete the wrong entry in the routing table to resolve TTL Expired in Transit error.
   
   To delete a wrong entry on your routing table, use the route delete command.
   
   
   
3. Increase the Time To Live value of a packet
   
   We also need to make sure that the Time To Live value set for the packet is reasonable.
   
   You can increase the TTL value of a packet by using the -i parameter with the ping command.

I hope this tutorial helped you to identify and rectify the ping reply TTL Expired in Transit error. Destination Host Unreachable and Destination Net Unreachable are the other two important ICMP error messages I faced before.


CoreNetworkZ has tons of network-related tutorials like Request Timed Out and Error 678: The Remote Computer Did Not Respond.