[vox-tech] traceroute peculiarities

[Marc Elliot Hall]

I've been experiencing abnormal slowness on a connection from one of my 
RedHat servers to Verisign's credit card processing service. Although I 
haven't yet eliminated the possibility that my code is buggy, the 
following traceroute output seems to point at Verisign as being the 
culprit (particularly hops 15-16,22,26-27):
---------------------
traceroute to payflow.verisign.net (216.168.253.140), 30 hops max, 38 
byte packets
  1  gige-g4-0-9.gsr12012.fmt.he.net (64.71.128.125)  0.303 ms  0.237 ms 
  0.249 ms
  2  pos5-0.gsr12012.pao.he.net (64.62.249.122)  1.697 ms  1.530 ms 
1.808 ms
  3  ge4-0.mpr2.pao1.us.above.net (209.249.24.129)  1.754 ms  1.490 ms 
1.529 ms
  4  so-6-1-0.mpr4.sjc2.us.above.net (209.249.0.126)  2.171 ms  2.051 ms 
  2.242 ms
  5  so-1-0-0.pr1.sjc2.us.above.net (64.125.30.86)  2.261 ms  2.295 ms 
2.382 ms
  6  POS2-1.BR6.SAC1.ALTER.NET (204.255.168.69)  7.485 ms  8.434 ms 
12.592 ms
  7  0.so-2-0-0.XL2.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.53.6)  8.665 ms  8.761 ms 
9.835 ms
  8  0.so-0-0-0.XL2.SCL1.ALTER.NET (152.63.55.86)  13.075 ms  9.183 ms 
9.348 ms
  9  0.so-4-0-0.XR4.SCL1.ALTER.NET (152.63.55.98)  9.898 ms  10.715 ms 
11.601 ms
10  194.ATM6-0.GW7.SCL1.ALTER.NET (152.63.52.161)  12.121 ms  8.423 ms 
8.076 ms
11-14  * * *
15  verisignCA-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.212.98)  7.053 ms !X * *
16  verisignCA-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.212.98)  7.163 ms !X * *
17-21  * * *
22  * verisignCA-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.212.98)  7.312 ms !X *
23-25  * * *
26  * * verisignCA-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.212.98)  6.966 ms !X
27  * * verisignCA-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.212.98)  9.197 ms !X
28-30  * * *
---------------------
Is it *NORMAL* for traceroute to discover the same IP for multiple hops? 
Obviously, the '!X' on hops 15-16,22,26-27 means that Verisign doesn't 
*WANT* me to know about their internal network topology... But shouldn't 
the IP addresses be different?