Traveling Through a Network: Ping and Traceroute
Ping commands send 4 packets of 32 bytes to the destination
router IP.
Similar to using the ping command, traceroute sends
three packets of data to each router along the path to your destination
IP with each router counted as a hop.
Both commands were sent to the following
domains: google.com; austrailia.gov.au; gov.uk
google.com - ping
Ping command for google.com resulted
in and average travel time of 76ms with zero packet loss.
google.com - traceroute
Traceroute to google.com resulted in
11 successful hops with no timeouts and no significant latency along
the route. Average time to destination IP is 69ms
Ping command for austrailia.gov.au resulted
in an average travel time of 66ms with zero packet loss.
australia.gov.au - traceroute
Traceroute to austrailia.gov.au resulted in
18 successful hops with 7 request time outs, but the latency was still
low getting to the destination IP. Average time to destination IP is
52ms.
gov.uk - ping
The ping command for gov.uk resulted in
an average travel time of 72ms with zero packet loss.
gov.uk - traceroute
Traceroute to gov.uk resulted in
12 successful hops with no timeouts and low latency to the destination
IP. Average time to destination IP is 50ms.
There appeared to be an issue with my Verizon
Fios home network that returns 2 hop results when
using the traceroute command. The first is to the home
router followed by the destination IP. There are forums on this
issue, but that would be getting away from the assignment. I turned
on the mobile hotspot on my phone and tethered it to my
laptop for all the above traceroute results.
2 hop traceroute result
I think having to switch to my mobile
hotspot made this exercise more interesting. I noticed
in the traceroute examples that first 7 hops were my
phone’s IP (172.20.10.1) followed by six private 10.x.x.x addresses. I
assume since I was using my phone as a hotspot that these are T-Mobile's
routers routing my traffic through their internal
network until it went to the external routers. I believe the hop count
would have lower if the traceroutes would have been successful on my
home network. In addition to google.com, I ran ping and traceroute
commands on australia.gov.au (Australian government site) and
gov.uk (United Kingdom government site).
Average roundtrip ping/traceroute
times and hops for all domains:
Surprisingly, the slowest roundtrip time in
for my queries were to google.com. I would attribute this to the amount of
traffic that Google receives, but the response time was still
relatively fast. The main difference was the number of hops it took to
reach the destination. Google did have the fewest number of hops at 11,
followed by gov.uk at 12, and lastly australia.gov.au with 18.
Geographical location did affect the number of hops it took to reach a
destination, but it did not seem to have an impact on the speed to reach a
destination.
You can use ping and traceroute to
troubleshoot network connection issues between your computer and a
destination IP. Using the ping command will let you know if that IP is
reachable, if there is packet loss, and the average roundtrip time between your
computer and that IP address. If you discover there are slow speed, packet
loss, or connection timeouts, use traceroute to find where along the path
there is an issue. Traceroute pings every router along the path to your
destination IP, returning the roundtrip travel time between each router
and your computer. If you are not reaching the destination IP, traceroute
will show you if there is an issue with a router along the path that
is slowing/failing the connection, or if the connection is failing at the destination
IP itself (Inmotion Hosting, 2019). There are many reasons that
ping/traceroute commands could fail. Two common reasons are that the
destination IP is down, or there is a firewall rule blocking that IP
address. If your firewall is blocking the IP address, the
commands will fail prior to reaching out to any external routers,
usually after the first hop depending on where the firewall is in
your network. If the IP is down, the command will fail at the
destination IP.
Reference:
Inmotion Hosting. (2019, December
31). How to read a traceroute. Inmotion Hosting.
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