Traveling through a Network

 Part 1: Ping Activity

 

Part 2: Traceroute Activity

 

Part 3: Traveling through the Network Reflection Essay

In this week's second discussion forum, we learned how to ping and trace the routes of different websites from around the globe. I found out that pinging a website means sending small packets of information out to specific IP addresses and requesting a response from the recipient. Running a traceroute involves sending small packets of information to specific IP addresses and documenting the path that those packets take as they travel to those addresses. To run these commands, we need to open the Command Prompt (CMD) through our Windows operating system. When pinging websites from the US and Australia, I noticed very similar response times. After pinging Google.com on both the U.S. and Australian sites, I received an average response time of 17 milliseconds. However, after pinging a Chinese site using ".cn", I received an average response time of 303 milliseconds. Another response I got from pinging the Chinese site was a TTL (Time to Live). When conducting my traceroutes, my packets from the U.S. and Australia were both 8-10 hops with minimal response times. When tracing routes to the Chinese site, I got 20 hops, of which the last four timed out. After running both pings and traceroutes, I noticed that the pings were more responsive from Australia because it was closer than China. The round-trip time it took for my packets of information to reach a Chinese IP address was significantly longer and less stable than that of the Australian address. If we notice a slow website load time, we can use the ping command to check for packet loss and response times. Running traceroute can also help us find any timeouts, marked by asterisks. If these asterisks appear later in runtime, then we can conclude that the issue lies with the responding network and not ours. Some other issues we might encounter when pinging or tracing routes to other sites include our signals being blocked by firewalls or issues with the DNS.