Traveling Through a Network

By Matthew Berrett Basics Of IT - January 21, 2023

An interesting experiment is using ping and traceroute commands on your computer. To use ping or traceroute commands on a windows computer right click the Start menu and click run. Then type cmd into the textbox and click OK. Then in the command prompt, type ping, then space, then the specific domain name or IP address, and press enter. Follow the same steps to perform a traceroute, but instead of typing ping, type traceroute. Using ping and traceroute, you send signals or packets of information from your computer to websites, other computers, or devices within the network. After sending the signal through a ping or traceroute, you will be able to see if the other device or website got the signal, if it was returned, and how long it took to reach the other device or website. If, when doing a ping for a device such as a printer in the local network and you receive a “request timed out” message, this could mean an issue with the printer, such as not being connected to the internet. If the same message is found using the traceroute command, but the traceroute still says complete, then the “Hop” or router the signal was sent to either didn’t send a message back or a firewall is blocking the request. The reasons why a ping or a traceroute might time out or return with an error response is either due to a firewall from the other website or device not allowing access, or the website being pinged is down, or having a connection problem with the device, website, or on your end.

I noticed that pinging a website was quick, while a traceroute of the same website took longer. For each hop, the signal would give the router about 5 seconds to respond, and once those 5 seconds were up, it would mark the “hop” or router as timed out. Also, I noticed that the .com traceroutes took longer and had more “hops” than other countries such as .au (Australia) or .jp (Japan). For instance, tracerouting Amazon.com had 28 hops with 19 timed-out requests, and Amazon.au had 8 hops with 1 timed-out request. This showed me there were more routers to go through with the .com websites than the au or jp websites. Another difference I found was pinging Amazon.com took an average of 72ms while pinging Amazon.au took an average of 8ms, which I think meant more traffic and people were using the .com than the .au. Below are a few screenshots of the results I got while using ping and traceroute commands.

-Matthew

Ping.com