Traveling Through a Network

During our third week of class, we had a very brief introduction into networking.  Our assignment was to investigate and experiment with the ping and tracert commands.  We needed a sample of different geographical locations to test with.  Another part of our assignment was to explain how packets travel through a network.

When a person makes a query on the internet, the computer they are on creates packets to request the data from wherever they are looking.  At home, the packet path starts at the computer and travels through the Network Interface Card (nic) into the router.  From the router, the packet travels to the modem.  From the modem, the packet travels to the ISP that the user subscribes to.  The ISP then sends the packet out to the internet, where it travels to the network that has the information being requested.  The packet then follows a similar route but in reverse until it reaches the server with the information that it is requesting.  However, that was only one packet.  When a person is requesting information on the internet, their computer and networking gear are sending and receiving thousands of packets.

                My ping and traceroute results appear to be very close to the same despite my effort to glean different results.  I first pinged google.com, which should have routed to California and then back to my computer.  Next, I tested the connection between my computer and a server in Japan.  I was mildly surprised to see that I got almost identical results.  After Japan, I tried testing my connection with an Australian server.  Again, I got very similar results to the first test with Google. Typically, you would expect the traffic to take a longer time depending on the geographical distance between the two computers talking to each other.  Due to recent advances in technology and efforts to increase the communication capabilities between continents, a person can expect to see similar transit times of packets.  A caveat to this is when a request is made to a country that does not have modern internet infrastructure.  The speed of modern data is entirely dependent on the technology that is utilized to facilitate the communication.

                Ping and traceroute are used almost daily in most IT departments.  The commands are usually used as a first line troubleshooting step when a person is having trouble connecting to a network or to determine if there is an issue between the communicating computers.  Ping is most often used to check if a remote computer is online and connected to the network.  I often use ping to determine whether I will be able to remotely connect to a computer.  A home user might use the ping command to ping a website.  You would ping a website if you tried to travel to it and the site would not load.  Similar to a professional environment, the user would use the ping command to determine if the remote server (website) is online and connected to a network.  If a person can successfully ping a website, but they still are not able to connect to the site, they could then use the traceroute command.  Traceroute is used to find out where a packet is being stopped along the route between two talking computers.  Once you find out where the packets are being dropped, you can then attempt to contact the owner of the router to attempt to reconnect services.

Ping Assignment