Today I pinged and ran a traceroute on three websites:
- Google.com - the recommended test, a US company.
- CTRIP.com - a Chinese company I learned about in my last class.
- Restaurant-les-impressionnistes.com - Frech business I found by zooming into France on Google maps.
Summary Table of results:
| Google.com | CTRIP.com | https://restaurant-les-impressionnistes.com/ | |
| Country | USA | China | France |
| Ping: Round Trip min-max | 14 ms - 17 ms | 240 ms - 244 ms | 163 ms - 185 ms |
| Ping: Packet Loss | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Traceroute: Hop Count | 11 | 25 | 21 |
| Traceroute: Failed Hops | 7 (out of 33) | 29 (out of 75) | 23 (out of 63) |
Immediately noticeable is that the USA company had a faster round trip time and fewer hops, the French company was second, and the Chinese company had the highest round trip time and most hops according to the ping and traceroute. The two international traceroutes had a pair of matching IP addresses as intermediary steps showing that the routing started very similarly for these two. This demonstrates to me that there is a general connection between distance and response time when using the internet.
Ping and traceroute can be helpful in determining a point of failure. If the troubleshooter is familiar with what the results of these two tests are in an ideal situation, they can better identify the breakpoint by comparing current results (Radware, n.d). For example, with ping. If the ping round trip to Google.com was unusually high, there may be an issue with the user's internet. For the traceroute, if I know that there are supposed to be 25 hops, but I stop getting results after the 11th, the point of failure could be the transition between hops 11 and 12.
One of the things that strikes me as I work on progressing from just an internet user to someone who is trying to understand the internet is just how physical the digital landscape is. We use cell phones and other wireless devices all the time, basking in the mobility and convenience of it all, but just one or two network steps away is very physical hardware that exists and interacts with the real world. Wifi connects to routers, connect to modems, connect to ISP, connects to other ISP around the world, connects to the destination modem, then router, then the relevant target computer or server, just to send a response back the way it came. Packets of data - snippets of the information the user wants to send packaged with destination, source, and other relevant information, travel back and forth on this path all faster than we can comprehend (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019).
Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.
Radware. (n.d.) What is a Ping of Death (PoD) Attack? https://www.radware.com/security/ddos-knowledge-center/ddospedia/ping-of-death/#:~:text=A%20Ping%20of%20Death%20(PoD)%20attack%20is%20a%20form%20of,memory%20errors%20and%20system%20crashes
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