marks542004@yahoo.com wrote:

> A person in England has a problem accessing a website in the USA. I am
> in the USA and have no problem getting to the site. Ping gets the
> right IP adress so I presume its not q DNS fault.

That's an incredibly vague description of the problem. All you've told
is that he "has a problem". That could mean anything.

> we both do a tracert and BOTH timeout at the same address in the USA
> xxxxxxxxxx.vario.net

So that's not the problem.

> I can still access the site.
>
> Why does tracert fail and I still get access.
>
> Is this sometrhing to do with the time-to-live on the packets?

No, the site just blocks either the outbound packets or the replies to
them. They may do this for security reasons (to stop you from viewing
the internals of their network), to hide embarassing details (to stop
you from viewing the internals of their network), for security through
obscurity (if you can't figure out the IPs of the routers, you can't
attack them, they hope), or for some more legitimate security reason
(perhaps the replies might overload their routers, who knows).

> This is more from curiosity than anything . I have suggested he contact
> his local ISP and see if they can debug his problem.

Why? If you had any evidence it was a connectivity issue, you didn't
share it with us.

DS