Traveling Through a Network

I had my first experience using ping and traceroute! Networking isn’t my favorite thing at the moment, I would prefer it if all devices could magically connect to each other effortlessly and without fail. I’d pay good money for a magic wand to make it so! That being said, this activity was interesting. Hopefully more experiences like this one will help make me less in the market for an expensive magic wand.  

A ping sends a packet of information to an IP address and requests a response, to make sure the IP address can be reached. It can troubleshoot a connection issue with the receiving device. I sent a ping to google.com, australia.gov.au, and royal.uk, to test the reachability of IP addresses in several places in the world. I sent 4 packets successfully to all three addresses with no packets lost, so they were all reachable. My averages were 29.935, 30.228, and 32.616 milliseconds respectively. It was surprising to me that the ping to Australia took less time than the ping to the UK to respond, especially because it was so close to the US time. I would assume because of the geographic distance that the Australian IP address would have taken longer to send a response, but this did not seem to be the case.  

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A traceroute sends three packets of information to an IP address and shows the path it took to get there, requesting a response from each router along the way. This can troubleshoot a connection issue along the way between two devices and where that issue is along the way. I found the traceroute to be a little touchier, as I had to add the www at the beginning of the domain name before I got results on my Australia IP address. The times had a similar theme to the ping, the Australia address had a slightly shorter response time than the US address and the UK address took the longest. Again, I would have assumed a longer response as the hops got farther away, but I don’t see a correlation to this. There are a couple of errors that can occur with traceroute that would generate a * * * response. It could be a time out and the packet was not sent successfully, or this could occur due to a router not programmed to send a response. Ping commands are also used in Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which can make the page unavailable, so a destination can also have a firewall blocking these types of requests. I believe this is what happened with mine as hops 3 and 4 did not respond, but my traceroutes ended with the destination IP address all three times. 

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