Post #4- Traveling Through a Network

 I pinged and tracerouted www.google.com

 to a, www.ups.ch, and www.alibaba.ch.. The ping command verifies whether a host is reachable at a specific IP address by sending ICMP echo request packets and awaiting a response. Traceroute displays the route taken by packets to reach their destination, providing information about each hop along the path.

After pinging the three sites and tracerouting them as well, I was able to collect a lot of information about them. Google had the fastest ping of the three and that is because of the popularity and how often Google is visited on a daily basis and its all around exposure. All 4 packets were sent and received and none were lost on the ICMP ping request. Minimum round trip was 16ms and maximum was 26ms. The UPS.ch ping took much longer and had a time to live of 46. This one had a minimum round trip of 236ms and a max of 247ms, but no data was lost. Finally, the Alibaba.ch ping was in he middle of the three. All packets were sent and received with no data loss. The minimum round trip time was clocked in at 105ms and the max was at 128ms. 

I know that traceroute is where they show if the route has any problems or latency. Google had 11 lines of information when tracerouted and only time out once at line 6. Also, more information is provided than a ping on the google and that is the IPV6 and hops which are the numbered lines. The Ups tracert seemed to take a few minutes to complete. All 30 hops were shown and 14 request time outs occurred. Geographical issues as New York and Newark is shown in the first few hops. Alibaba had no time out requests and had 13 total hops. It looked pretty fine from Union to East Windsor and then Zurich and finally making it's destination.

These are very handy dandy tools to use an administrator and even as a layman to figure stuff out regarding the system. None of the tracerts had initial problems so I can rule out that my SOHO is working properly. Looks like UPS.ch did not make its destination so a server could be down or a cord is not plugged in. Many issues can occur and it is about trying to solve the problem.