Traveling Through a Network

        Ping and traceroute are two commands that assist in troubleshooting network issues. I’ve had my share of network issues when setting up routers and my Slingbox many years ago. I discovered this week that when on my company’s network, these commands only work for internal IP address and computer names. I often use ping when working from home to be sure that my laptop that is docked on my desk is still up and running.

Ping vs. Traceroute

        PING stands for “Packet Internet Groper.” Pinging an IP address or website means sending small packets of information out to a specific IP address and requesting a response from the recipient.
If the destination is reached, the recipient computer sends back an echo reply to acknowledge receipt. If no response is received within a certain time period, then the request times out. (Guide to Ping and traceroute)

        Running a traceroute, also called tracert on some operating systems, means sending small packets of information out to a specific IP address and documenting the path that the packets take as they travel there. The traceroute command lists all of the routers that the packets pass through until they reach their destination and the time between each router stop, also known as a hop. If the packet is unable to reach its destination, the traceroute results will show exactly where the transmission failed. (Guide to Ping and traceroute)

Ping Tests & Results

        For this assignment, in addition to google.com, I chose gov. au and government.fr to review. For the ping of each site, I chose to send 10 packets of data and for all there was 100% transmission and 0% packet loss. The speed at which the packets were sent and received were different and I did wonder if the results would have been the same had I connected to the router I usually connect to at home, which is connected to a network switch as opposed to the main router on my network which is connected to a modem.

Website	Minimum (ms)	Maximum (ms)
Google.com (USA)	11.981	27.753
gov.au (Australia)	12.275	21.587
government.fr (France)	84.487	93.959

        I was quite surprised by the results as I expected the time to be longer to ping Australia than France since Australia is almost two times the distance away.

Traceroute Tests & Results

        The traceroute command is not one I use when troubleshooting since I’m usually trying to test that I can get out to the internet, not testing for hops. What I did find interesting in my results was that I had a timeout on google.com and that Australia again was just as fast and used less routers. This leaves me wondering if the Australia site is actually hosted in the US or if there is a data center in the US that handles US based traffic.

Website	Routers	Shortest roundtrip (ms)	Longest roundtrip (ms)
Google.com (USA)	15	11.645	28.084
gov.au (Australia)	8	10.197	22.100
government.fr (France)	10	9.721	113.086

The speed of the roundtrip to my router is excluded

Conclusions

        What I have learned from using ping is that the further distance the data has to travel, the longer it takes to get there. As well, using traceroute I can see that the distance away doesn’t determine how many routers the data must pass through to get to the destination. If a ping fails or times out it could mean that your internet connection is not giving you an IP address that’s external to your network. It could also mean that the site you are trying to reach is not working or its far away and the roundtrip is taking too long.

        Both of these tools are quite useful when setting up and managing network connections.

References

INT 101 Week 3 Interactive Assignment Guide to Ping and Traceroute Commands Retrieved from:         https://ashford.instructure.com/courses/28825/files/5570135/

Google.com

Gov.au

Government.fr