Traveling Through a Network

April 19, 2023

Traveling Through a Network

For this discussion we were asked to practice “ping” and “tracerouting” different IP addresses / websites. According to Vahid and Lysecky, “a computer communicates via the internet by sending a packet, containing information like an address for a destination computer, the data size, and the data itself (email message, web page, piece of video, etc.)” (2019). We started out pinging Google.com to learn the commands and I went and tried this on Australia.gov.au and Presidence.pf. pinging and tracerouting are able to be done by the packets being sent from one device, through different switches / routers, until finally reaching the end host destination. Pinging goes the quick tool as it reaches out to the destination to see if it can be reached. While tracerouting is done to find the route for the packets to actually get there. At my work, we ping devices in order to see if we can actually retrieve a connection. We have remote app capabilities, but this sometimes can have its own issue. So by pinging something, we can start to narrow down the issues. While at my work, the networking team could use the traceroute to tell the technician that there is a blockage somewhere in the path which can be caused by a router.

When it came to the actual activity of doing the pinging and tracerouting, I was able to do it successfully to each IP. Australia.gov.au came back with the better average round trip while Presidence.pf was the slower. This can be caused by the distance from my server to the end destination and even if there is too much traffic occurring along the way. The high traffic can also become a reason in which an error or timeout could occur.

It is crazy how many different tools and items are involved when it comes to IT. It is a growing field, and we have the ability to continuously learn. Below are my ping and traceroute screenshots all done using a hotspot.

Ping google.com