Traveling Through a Network

Based on my experience using the ping and traceroute commands, I think the packets travel through different routers on the network till it gets to whatever website you are trying to get to.

Comparing ping and traceroutes

For this interactive, I decided to choose websites based in USA, Japan, and Australia. The following websites are as follows:

·         Google.com

·         Yahoo.co.jp

·         News.com.au

The travel time were pretty much the same when it came to USA and Australia sitting at an average of 48 millisecond (ms). When it came to Japan though, the travel time was higher with an average of 209ms. All three sent four packets but each one had different Time To Live (TTL) or hops until the packets were killed. When tracerouting, I got to see a little further when it came to pings and see in depth how many routers it took to get to my destination. From the USA side, it timed out a lot more than the others, but it took mid 30ms to get to Google. From AU, it timed out and took mid 30ms to get to News. Even though Japan took the longest, it showed me every router it took to get to Yahoo. As far as relationships between roundtrip time and geographical location goes, everything looks to be same. I would not know for certain which routers belong to which countries until I look up the IP addresses or I download a software like Wireshark which can show geographic map of the different routers the ping passes through.

Ping and traceroutes – Troubleshooting Internet connection problems

A way for ping and traceroute to help with internet connection problems would be if a website is down but your internet connection is fine. One could simply put in the command ping/website to see how long the travel time is but in a way, it will not show where the problem lies. Traceroute however will show which router is causing problems towards the destination website. The same would go to see if a website is too slow, traceroute would show which router is showing more milliseconds. A reason for a traceroute command to time out could possibly be that there is a problem with one of the routers on the way to its destination. Another reason for a traceroute command to time out could also be that the router was not configured to return traceroute replies but still allowed the data packets to pass through to the next router.