Traveling Through a Network

 This exercise was my first time using the ping and traceroute commands. Because I am using a Windows computer, I began both commands by right-clicking on the Start button, selecting “Run” and then typed in “cmd.” This takes you to a command screen. This is where you type in either “ping” or “tracert”, 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 three different websites: Google, Yahoo, and the President of Ukraine’s 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 129ms. The second website that I pinged was president.gov.ua, It had an average ping time of 65ms, which was surprisingly faster than Google. Yahoo was slower than the other sites I chose with an average of 197ms.

Next, I ran the traceroute command on the same three 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).   Google had 20 hops and timed out 4 times. President.gov.ua had 13 hops and timed out twice. Yahoo.co.jp resulted in 16 hops and timed out 3 times.

I was surprised that the President of Ukraine site was the fastest due to its geographical location; the site had an average ping time of 32ms.

The ping command can check for basic connections and measure the delays between the requesting and destination hosts. It may be used to see whether there's an issue with your network, or between your network and the internet. Traceroute is also helpful in troubleshooting because it shows you the path that traffic takes to reach the website. Like ping, it also displays the delays that occur at each stop. If you’re having issues reaching a website and that website is working properly, it’s possible there’s a problem somewhere on the path between your computer and the website’s servers. Traceroute and ping assist you by helping determine where the problem is.

There are several reasons why a traceroute may have a requested time out. One reason could be that the destinations firewall or other security is blocking your request. Another reason may be that the host is not reachable, or the server may be disconnected from the network.