Post #4 – Traveling Through a Network [CLO: 6]

 You initially completed this post in your Traveling Through a Network interactive assignment in Week Three. Review the instructions here and incorporate the peer and instructor feedback from the Week Three interactive assignment in your fourth blog post.

In this interactive assignment, you will use ping and traceroute commands as tools for exploring how packets of information travel through networks.

Ping Activity
Follow the steps in the Guide to Ping and Traceroute Commands to ping Google.com. Take a screenshot and document the results, including the number of packets sent, received, or lost and the range of response speeds.

Ping at least two other websites, choosing sites hosted in a different regions of the world (for example, websites ending with .au or .cn or .jp would be hosted in Australia, China, or Japan, respectively). Take a screenshot and document the ping results for each website.

Traceroute Activity
Follow the steps in the Guide to Ping and Traceroute Commands to run a traceroute to Google.com. Take a screenshot and document the results, including how many routers it passes through, how long it takes to hop from router to router, and if it fails before reaching its destination.

Run a traceroute to the same two websites you used in the ping activity. Take a screenshot and document the traceroute results for each website.

Traveling Through a Network Reflection Essay
Reflecting on your experience using the ping and traceroute commands, describe how packets travel through the network. Compare the ping and traceroute results from the different websites and explain how the paths to the different destinations differ. Make a conclusion about the relationship between the roundtrip time and geographical location.

Explain how the ping and traceroute commands can be used to troubleshoot Internet connection problems. Give at least two possible reasons why a ping request or traceroute command might time out or return with an error response.

Your reflection essay should be a minimum of 300 words in length. 

Guided Response: Review several of your classmates’ posts, and respond to at least two of your peers by end of Day 7. In each response, you will compare your own traceroute and ping results with those of your peer. Explain why you might have received different results than your peer, even when running a traceroute or pinging the same website. Evaluate your peer’s network architecture reflection essay and provide at least one suggestion about how they could improve the essay before they post it to their Information Technology Blog in Week Four.

Jesse Neubauer

Sep 24, 2020 at 4:41pm

I get the feeling that I'm either doing this wrong, or it's going weirdly because I'm still on my work computer. I'll try again once I'm clocked out for the night.

Sean [redacted]

Sep 24, 2020 at 5:42pm

Hey Jesse,

If you use a VPN for work and are logged into it while performing these commands then it will try to route through your works VPN which could very well be killing the traffic through your works firewall. A common security procedure is to disable ICMP or ping in corporate networks where not needed and you may be hitting something similar here. You could theoretically change the default route for the spcific sites on your PC to your local gateway instead of the VPN gateway to get around it for the purpose of this assignment but just temporarily disabling the VPN adapter should do the trick and is probably easier.

Jesse Neubauer

Sep 24, 2020 at 6:24pm

Hey Sean, I appreciate the input, but I'm afraid your instructions were a little beyond me at this point, sorry! Not to worry, I tried here on my personal laptop, and that seems to have worked just fine. Maybe by the time I've finished my degree, I'll have a lot more understanding of what you just said.

Sean [redacted]

Sep 25, 2020 at 3:24pm

Hello Jesse

I am glad it worked on your personal laptop and that you were able to get it figured out!

Alex [redacted]

TuesdaySep 29 at 7pm

Hello Jesse!

Did you get to try this activity on your personal computer? Once I tried it on my wife's computer my results came out similar to everyone else's. I guess work computers require a different setting than our personal computers?   

Kommeng [redacted]

ThursdayOct 1 at 10:14am

The ping request can also mean your provider is having issues with their internet. I would try to wait next day to do it again. It can also mean you  are might be having issues with your router.

Jesse Neubauer

Sep 24, 2020

So a ping to american Google averages 29 ms, and the trace route experienced one time-out and completed in 15 hops.

A ping to Australian Google averages 29 ms, and the trace route experienced no time-outs and completed in 16 hops.

A ping to Chinese Google averages 29 ms, and the trace route experienced one time-out and completed in... 16 hops? It looks like there was a little bit of packet loss there around lines 12 and 13.

Now it seems to me that the results of pinging/tracing these three locations are all pretty darn similar... I'm not sure if that's because they're all google? Does google base all their servers domestically, even when they're meant to serve distant locations? It's possible that in the past, the results from faraway locations like this used to take noticeably longer, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I could see how the tracert command could be used for limited troubleshooting, as it can tell you whether your ping is getting past your router, modem, and ISP... And I suppose, to some extent, it could be used to determine whether the site you're trying to reach is operational. If it stops or times out in one of those first three hops, that can tell you that your router isn't getting your signal, or your modem isn't connected to the network, or your ISP is having trouble providing service. 

Janice [redacted]

Sep 27, 2020 at 1:08am

Hello Jesse,

I enjoyed reading your post as usual.

I did not ping the same websites as yourself. But the one's that I did ping did time out. Keep up the great work.

Janice [redacted]

Steven [redacted]

Sep 28, 2020 at 4:55pm

Hi Jesse,

   Great work on your post I did use google as well for the first part of our discussion, but you went a step further by going to the Chinese version of Google which it has apparently a quick response for the round trip being 29ms course at the same time Google is one huge company that is a global entity and they have servers everywhere so that's one reason for the quick response. Have a good night and keep up the good work.

Noemi [redacted]

Sep 25, 2020 at 1:35pm

This activity will help us understand networking and how information is tunneled through from one point to another. Trace Route, tracert, and Ping are 2 commands we needed to interactively try to plug and in annotate our result. This brings to back to simpler times to verifying and validating information is being sent from source to destination. Ping was used to justify that we are able to reach the provider or at least talk to them. Trace route is to show how long it takes to include hops to get to where you need. Another fun fact is when dealing with commands, if you hit the top arrow on a new command line, the previous command will pop up. You can change out the command as often to find result any way. By adding “/” to the command, it will annotate the available commands you can potentially use. These two commands are somewhat limited other than allowing you to understand its accessibility and how soon/long it will take to get to its destination.

ping 4.jpgping 10.jpg

ping ashford.jpgtracert ashford.jpgtracert ebay au.jpgtracert google.jpg

I tried to ping ebay.com.au but it seems that my domain isn’t designated to Australia could be causing backlash. I also tried getting the trace route set up for it, but the trace timed out about 10 hops. With that being said, this does provide a bit of a background what network infrastructure/transport technicians have to tunnel and validate on the daily. We continuously monitor and troubleshoot if and why information is or isn’t getting to where it needs to be. Maintenance on sites are key to maintaining infrastructure and that links, source/destinations, are correct and do not fail. Allowing us to understand, interpret, and log our finding provide us to better reflect what we have learned during this activity. This was a fun side project and has reigniting my passion for Networking.

Jesse Neubauer

Sep 27, 2020 at 8:20pm

Noemi, you're not kidding about your passion for networking! It sounds like you've got quite the in-depth view of all those different hop locations. When the assignment prompted us to consider how the traceroute could be used for troubleshooting purposes, I admittedly had mostly been thinking within the context of my own everyday scope. But like you said, for a network infrastructure/transport technician, this command would be *crucial* in finding out what part of the network is causing a connection issue!

Jarale [redacted]

Sep 27, 2020 at 6:46pm

Good day Class,

My wife is an IT professional and she uses these commands on a regular basis. They are used for network or communication issues between networks or devices. The lower the MS the quicker the site will go. Traceroute is a command used to determine how many hops it takes to get where you are going. This is a helpful command because it can tell where the break is or where the connection is having issues or failing.  Both of these commands are utilized highly by IT professionals all over to troubleshoot many problems.  Ping is the first thing you would usually use to troubleshoot any kind of connection issue.  The first thing I did was ping google.com, The result returned a very quick response, Google is likely the most utilized search engine. I also did a traceroute for google, all was successful for both of these. 

Ping_Google.PNGTraceroute_Google.PNG

As I learn to understand these commands, they both seemed successful. Google was able to ping in n less than 30 ms. And the traceroute connected through and I did not see any drops in the hops if I understand it correctly. I understand the concept of using these and being able to understand what they mean is basic network troubleshooting.

For the others, I did a ping on eBay.cn, which is eBay in China. the ping completed successfully but at a time of over 200 ms. This I assume is because it is an international website.  The traceroute returned some errors, the request timed out on hop 14 and again on hop 18. You can see as it went through the hops when it starts to go international, as the time gets up to over 200 ms again, just like the ping and it times out a couple of times.  The results are below.

Traceroute_eBay.cn.PNG

Ping_ebay.cn.PNG

All of the traces and pings were completed, it is interesting to see the time-lapse in the international sites, as like me, I am sure people do not realize that it takes more time or have any idea how much time it takes and what it takes to get where you want to go. I find this stuff fascinating and that I why I want to enter into the world of IT when I retire from the government.

Jarale [redacted]

Jesse Neubauer

Sep 27, 2020 at 8:36pm

Jarale, it looks like your route to Chinese Ebay took significantly more hops than my route to Chinese Google, with much larger ping times than I was getting. This makes me suspect even more strongly that Google's international versions may be running off of domestically-located servers. I tried to find out just now, but I'm not even sure if that's public information or not... I don't know enough about these things to even know how to ask.

Jarale [redacted]

Sep 28, 2020 at 10:46pm

Jesse,

That is an interesting point you make. It would not surprise me at all. I believe Google has most of the market as far as google searching and connectivity around the globe. It is interesting that happened. I am going to have to go back and do google China and see what is returns for me as well.  Thank you for giving me something else to look at.

I look forward to communicating with you over the last couple of weeks of class. It has been fun learning these past few weeks.

Jarale [redacted]