Traveling through a Network

 

Good morning class,

 

This week’s discussion prompt was interesting to me as I have not used these functions on my computer before. I have heard the terms such as “Ping” or run a “Tracer”, but I never fully understood what they meant. Seeing the inner workings of the internet and how the information travels through connections is actually very fascinating for me.

Starting with the Ping functions, I chose two websites that were in my part of the world (in addition to the required google ping). I was curious to see if the results would be different than my classmates that may run a ping to japan but don’t live here. Below are the results that I got, showing the number of packets of information, how many were lost if any, and how fast the ping was completed. My initial reaction is that all of the information being shared around the world at lightning speed is truly remarkable. When a packet of information is sent from a source to a destination, it has to travel through multiple routers and networks before returning to the source. This helps in analyzing the latency or delay that may present itself between the two destinations.

 

On the flip side, the traceroute command shows a more detailed view of the path that the packets of information traveled. Every hop from router or network segment was shown (displayed as an IP address). This is possible because the traceroute send packets with increasingly larger TTL (time-to-live) values, which essentially causes them to expire at each hop along the way. Below are the traceroutes for the three websites that I chose to ping earlier in the same order.

 

Overall, using the ping and traceroute commands showed me that they are valuable tools that can be used to diagnose and understand network connectivity. This will be especially useful with troubleshooting internet connection issues. Being able to see the round trip times and paths can really help find the root problem.

Todd