Traveling Through a Network

Based on the ping and traceroute commands, packets travel from the original computer that pings or traceroutes another computer. The ping command and traceroute command hops from one computer to another until it reaches the destination computer. The ping command calculates the time it takes to reach the destination and shows any packet loss along the route. The traceroute shows each host the traceroute command goes through on it’s way to the destination computer.

My ping to Google.com took a minimum time of 13 ms, with a maximum of 16 ms with no packet loss.  Pinging wildberries.ru took a minimum of 190 ms and a maximum of 192 ms with no packet loss, and pinging Rakuten.co.jp took a minimum of 119 ms and a maximum of 123 ms with no packet loss as well.

I also did a Traceroute of the same three locations, upon analyzing the screenshots of ping and traceroutes I noticed that the websites in Japan such as rakuten.co.jp and wildberries.ru in Russa took a lot longer to ping than the Google website.  The traceroute confirmed the ping results, the locations further away, such as Japan and Russia, took an extended amount of time to respond.  The traceroute confirmed the farther away the location such as rakuten.co. in Japan and wildberries.ru in Russia took much longer. I could see all the hops the traceroute went through along with each IP address. The traceroute to wildberries.ru had several timeout issues along the route, that was the command that took the longest amount of time. I was surprised that ping to Japan responded faster than Russia since Russia is closer than Japan.

Ping can be used as an internet troubleshooter as it shows latency and packet loss.  If there’s no response from a host, a host might be down, or there might be a problem along the route. I there’s packet loss there may be congestion or an overloaded router along the path. Traceroute can be used to find where a problem may be along the route if one of the hops times out; that could be where the problem is along the path.