Traveling through a network

For this blog, we will find out what happens when we use ping and traceroute.

Ping

I started with google because that seemed like an obvious choice. I'm assuming that this is pinging the north america servers. There were four packets of 32 bytes sent and received with none lost in 27 milliseconds.

I then pinged BBC.co.uk (5,000 miles away) with the same amount of data and all were sent and received but in even less time: 8 milliseconds.

Finally, I pinged maasaimara.ke (9,000 miles away) with the same amount of data again and while all were sent and received with no loss, this time it took 119 milliseconds to make the roundtrip.

It appears that the length of time taken for the ping indicates the speed of the internet. In this case, it seems that maasaimara.ke has the slowest internet connection. I was actually rather surprised to note that BBC.co.uk had a shorter round trip time than google.

Traceroute

Traceroute, on the other hand, shows the route that internet traffic takes to reach a website. This is useful in checking if there are connection problems and being able to pinpoint exactly where the problems are.

Once again, BBC.co.uk took the shortest time and shortest route, a total of only 6 hops, with the first one probably being a problem with my local network connection.

For BBC.co.uk, the longest route took 43ms and the shortest only 7 ms.

Google had 16 hops ranging from 6ms to 36 ms with one timed-out request, again showing a probable problem with my local connection.

Maasaimara.ke had 18 hops ranging from 2ms to 122ms and several timed-out requests on the route.

This was an interesting activity to see how data moves around and how it is possible to tell exactly where a problem is. By using either pinging or traceroute commands, one is able to get the IP address of the problematic connection and can therefore be able to fix or isolate the problem.