Traveling Through a Network

Gamio, Lazaro, (2015, May 31). How data travels across the Internet. The Washington Post.

    This exercise was my first time using the ping and traceroute commands. I found this to be very interesting. To begin either of these commands, using a Windows OS, right-click on the Start button. Select “Run” and then type in “cmd.” This takes you to a command screen. This is where you type in either “ping” or “tracert” (short for traceroute), a space, and then the website. 

    PING is the abbreviation for “Packet InterNet Groper.” When you ping a website or IP address, you send 32-bit packets of data out and hope for a reply. A successful ping will result in four replies that echo the packets of data sent out and the response time. I tried this for four different websites that I frequent; Google, Yahoo, Motoringfile, and KRDO (a local news website). These pings resulted in minimum, maximum, and average times for all four packets of data sent out. Google had an average round trip time of 15ms. The second website that I pinged was www.motoringfile.com. I pinged this site in particular because it usually takes longer to load than most websites. I had an average ping time of 135ms, which was much slower than Google. Yahoo was also slower than Google with an average of 41ms. When I pinged our local news website, www.krdo.com, I had a result of 12ms. I was surprised by how quick that site was.

Next, I ran the traceroute command on these four websites. The result of running a traceroute command gives you the path a packet of information goes from your computer, through your router and modem, through the internet, and to the recipient’s ISP (Gamio, 2015). All four of my websites had 12 “hops” along the way. The far right column in the results is the IP address for each step along the way, starting with 192.168.1.1, your default router address. Google had quick results. Motoringfile had some slow times going from one place to another, which I wasn’t surprised with after running the ping command on that website. I also had a request that timed out. I only provided the traceroutes for Google and Motoringfile. Yahoo! and KRDO gave me similar results to Google. 

Next, I ran these two commands on websites far across the world. I found a Japanese social media website called Mixi. The average ping for this website was 142ms. I was not too surprised with this result as if figured there would be many more stops along the route. Next, I ran the traceroute command. I had several results that timed out. This would be the reason of the long ping time. The next long-distance website that I chose was the President of Ukraine. I had an average ping time of 32ms. I was surprised with this result. I found that the number of hops when running the traceroute command was 16 with only two results that timed out. 

After running these commands from my home computer, I am curious to see how these times and routes compare when I run these commands from a computer at work. I am also curious to see what other students have found and what my results for their websites would show. 

References:

Gamio, Lazaro, (2015, May 31). How data travels across the Internet. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/security-of-the-internet/bgp/#:~:text=confirming%20successful%20delivery.-,The%20Internet%20works%20by%20chopping%20data%20into%20chunks%20called%20packets,in%20a%20series%20of%20hops.&text=Entering%20the%20network-,Each%20packet%20hops%20to%20a%20local%20Internet%20service%20provider%20(ISP,network%20%E2%80%93%20usually%20for%20a%20fee. Links to an external site. 

Vahid, Frank, (2019, February). TEC 101: Fundamentals of Information Technology & Literacy.