Playing with Pings and Traceroutes
Turns out that doing pings and traceroutes are a lot more fun than I thought! The sites I pinged and performed a traceroute on were google.com, Australia.gov.au, and Egypt.gov.eg. The first 2 sites, Google & Australia sent 4 packets and all 4 were returned. However, while 4 packets were sent to the Egypt website, none were returned. Somewhere along the path, every packet failed.
When we ping a website, we are sending information to it and checking to see how long it takes. Pinging is helpful in order to see if a website is available and if we are able to access it. In my case, I was able to ping and complete a traceroute to Google and the Australia website. Unfortunately, I was not able to access the Egypt website.
Packets travel through the internet by hopping from one router to another. When we perform a ping, we send multiple packets of data to our destination and wait for those packets to be echoed back to us. This time is typically measured in milliseconds. When we perform a traceroute, we send packets of data to each router and have them send us a notification when they receive it. This is done using Time To Live or TTL. Basically, we tell the system to send the packet to 1 router and then stop. When that happens, the router sends us a message that the package has been dropped. The IP address and roundtrip time are recorded. Then, the system sends another packet to the 1st 2 routers and relays the same information. This continues on until the final destination is reached or we max out the number of hops specified.
Google was reached after going through 11 routers, the roundtrip took about 17 ms. Australia was reached after going through 13 routers and 18 ms. This indicates that the server for the Australia website is further from me, making it take a bit longer to access. Because the traceroute failed, we cannot see how many hops it would have taken. However, we can pinpoint where the issue started, which is on router 14. We can see that there is a big jump once we get to the 10th router. This could mean that the 10th router is either far away from the 9th, or that there is an issue with that router.
Ping and traceroute commands can help troubleshoot internet connection problems by helping to pinpoint an error. The ping command tells us if a server is available while the traceroute commands give more detail as to where our request is running into problems. One reason that a ping or traceroute command might time out is if a router is not programmed to send information of a dropped packet back to us. Another reason could be that it took too long to send the information.
References
Internet-class (2016, September 8). How does traceroute work [Video]. Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G05y9UKT69s
Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.
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