A Glimpse Into Networks

"Stop Googling if such and such is down. Use traceroute, stupid."

Ping Activity

Pinging Google.com

With this first ping exercise, my computer sent 4 packets, got 4 back at an average round trip of about 147ms.

Pinging Canadian travel site

In this second ping exercise, my computer sent 4 packets, got back 3 packets.

Pinging Japanese Rakuten site

This ping was successful. 4 sent, 4 received 195ms average.

Tracert Activity

Trace Google.com

Trace Canadian travel site

Trace the Japanese Rakuten site

After completing these exercises, I've gained a stronger grasp of how networks operate. It seems that network commands are routed through numerous computers throughout the internet before they reach their intended destinations. 

When doing the traceroute activities, I found that websites based in the United States had lower ms response times. Whenever I tried tracing sites that were farther from my location, these ms response times increased considerably. Now while these response times are all measured in the milliseconds level, it's clear that each hop has to travel farther through various routers to get to its intended destination.

Ping and traceroute commands can be helpful tools in trying to determine if a computer is online. If you can get a hold of the IP address of the computer you are trying to diagnose, using those commands and analyzing the responses received can reveal much information. If you are pining that IP address and it times out, more than likely, that computer is no longer online. Another reason a ping or traceroute command may return with an error response is if there is an issue with the ISP. Using traceroute, we can see at which point a hop goes to the internet service provider, and if it is consistently erroring at that point, we can determine that the ISP has an issue.