Hello Dakshinamurthy
This is indeed an interesting situation. It seems that the destination IP is routing to itself, and you can see the response times rising as if it is going through multiple hops. Without knowing more about your topology, I’d like to ask the following questions:
- What device has this IP address? Is it a server within the office network or a networking device? If it’s a networking device, it would be interesting to see what its routing table looks like.
- What kind of VPN do you have installed? Does it use an ASA? It seems that the ASA has an interesting behaviour when tracerouting over a VPN link. The ASA will actually avoid decrementing the TTL, so it may be that without one decrement, the tracroute process reaches the destination, but the TTL is not 0 on its return, so it keeps sending packets. It turns out traceroute cannot accurately measure hop count through an ASA VPN tunnel unless it is configured appropriately.
Some interesting links that may help you in your troubleshooting include:
Let us know of your progress so we can continue to help you.
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz