I am looking at this after the other comment you said your friend made... I honestly think he has no idea what he's talking about. I am sure that within a persons own network, they could make a packet propagate for however long they wanted (why they would do this however is beyond me), however, once the packet is on the internet, and being routed on the public internet, it has one of 3 fates: 1. It is routed to the destination and arrives correctly 2. It arrives at a router that does not have a route to the destination network and is dropped 3. If there is a routing loop or for some reason number 1 or 2 do not happen, the TTL will be decremented at each router until the TTL is 0 and the packet is dropped. Once the packet is received by the router, there is no magical way that the TTL is going to be reset to 255. Again, direct your friend to RFC 791 and tell him to read it before he makes any more silly comments :)

I am looking at this after the other comment you said your friend made... I honestly think he has no idea what he's talking about. I am sure that within a persons own network, they could make a packet propagate for however long they wanted (why they would do this however is beyond me), however, once the packet is on the internet, and being routed on the public internet, it has one of 3 fates: 1. It is routed to the destination and arrives correctly 2. It arrives at a router that does not have a route to the destination network and is dropped 3. If there is a routing loop or for some reason number 1 or 2 do not happen, the TTL will be decremented at each router until the TTL is 0 and the packet is dropped. Once the packet is received by the router, there is no magical way that the TTL is going to be reset to 255. Again, direct your friend to RFC 791 and tell him to read it before he makes any more silly comments :)