Traveling Through a Network

Computers all around the world are connected to each other through the internet. These computers send packets of information over the internet to communicate with each other (Vahid & Lysecky, 2017). These packets follow a path that begins with the origin computer and then follows a path through the router and modem, to the ISP and along different routers to the final IP address (Vahid & Lysecky, 2017). As users, we can use the ping and traceroute commands to see how long it takes to get to the final destination and to follow the route that the packets are taking to get to the final destination. These commands can also be used to troubleshoot problems when we believe that the internet isn’t working correctly.

The three destinations I have chosen to use for this week’s assignment are google.com, ynet.co.il, and Rakuten.co.jp.

Google.com 

As you can see from the screenshot provided, the ping sent four packets and received four packets. Meaning that there were 0 packets lost. The average ping time results were 42ms, with a maximum of 44ms and a minimum of 41ms. 

The above screenshot is of the traceroute I did for google.com. This traceroute took 18 hops to reach the destination 172.217.15.110 which is the IP address for google.com. The time it took to hop between each destination varied from 13ms to 51 ms. It also timed out one time. 

Ynet.co.il

The second site I used was ynet.co.il. This is an Israeli news website. The ping sent four packets, received four packets and had 0 lost packets. It averaged 75ms. 

The traceroute for ynet.co.il was 16 hops. It averaged between 10ms and 138ms to reach its destination of 23.43.167.201 which surprised me. I didn't know that this news site was hosted here in the United States despite being an Israeli newspaper. 

Rakuten.co.jp

This screenshot shows the ping for Rakuten.co.jp which is a Japanese shopping site. This also sent four packets, received four packets and lost 0 packets. It averaged 153ms, which is the longest of the three websites that I pinged. 

My final screenshot is the traceroute for rakuten.co.jp. It took 18 hops to reach its destination IP address. The request timed out one time. It averaged between 13ms and 178ms. By far it took the longest time to run the traceroute on this website. 

After running the ping and traceroute on these three websites I have come to the conclusion that it takes longer to complete depending on how far away the destination site is hosted. I came to this conclusion because the site in Japan took the longest. While I thought that the Israeli site would come in second, it actually came in the quickest because their site was actually hosted the closest to where I live. I found that to be quite interesting. 

Ping and traceroutes can be extremely helpful to diagnose network errors. Using these tools one is able to find out where packets of data are being lost. It can help to determine whether a problem is occurring at the origin, destination, or somewhere in between. The traceroute can help to determine if there is a problem somewhere in the middle or of in there is congestion somewhere along a route. Errors can determine whether there is data loss or if hardware like the router or modem is not functioning correctly. 

References:

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017). Computing technology for all. Retrieved from zybooks.zyante.com/