Traveling Through a Network

 

Hello Everyone,

 

In this discussion, I will use the ping and traceroute commands to explore how packets of information travel through networks. I will give a reflection of each command, and I will start with the Ping command and then move to the Traceroute command.

Reflection Ping Activity

Pinging is a very common and basic command, yet very useful. The ping command can answer two questions, can I reach the IP of the device I’m pinging? And, is the connection speed fair, good or excellent? More or less, a ping below 20ms is considered ideal. A ping round trip of 20ms or less is expected when pinging any device in your Local Area Network (LAN). With new technology, internet speeds are increasing. Now you can purchase 1Gbps speeds for residential service from most ISP providers. Long are the days you have to install a landline to get a 56k modem internet connection.

When I ran the command to ping google.com, I got between 20 and 21ms round trip response. When I ping Apple.com, I got an average of 17ms. But this is because both companies are American own.   However, when I ping Samsung, a company from South Korea, I got an average round trip of 15ms. If you were expecting a higher round trip time, I have to say that companies worldwide can have servers closer to their customers with cloud services like AWS, Azure, and many others. This will give customers a better experience when browsing their websites regardless of what part of the world they are located. However, when the website you try to reach is hosted on a server on the other side of the world, you will see a higher time on your ping round trip. High ping round trip time is not bad; however, it all depends on what you are reaching. Some applications are very sensitive to latency, and other applications are not. Many applications like games and SQL databases will not tolerate high latency, usually above 200ms, and you are asking for trouble, but sometimes it doesn’t take that much. High pings round trip time have many causes. For example, the network can be flooded with computer communication, or there is a lousy router along the path, or sometimes the host server is having issues. But for sure, if a website host computer is across the world, you will most likely get high ping round trips because to reach that website, you have to go through many routers and devices to get to it. I will explain this in the Traceroute Activity.

Reflection Traceroute Activity

Like pinging, the traceroute command is also handy when working with networks. The main difference between pinging and doing a traceroute is the information you get. This command will display the time and IP of each device/hop between the computer executing the traceroute command and the final destination. Sometimes, many systems do not have the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) turned on, or they disable it. This causes a “Request timed out.” Error message return from these specific devices. 

I have been working in the IT field for many years. And up to now, I have used the ping command excessively. I rarely used the traceroute command; however, this tool is very powerful because sometimes you can see where the communications drops and pinpoint the devices blocking communication. Overall, the ping command and traceroute command (tracert) are essential tools for any IT tech guy.

References:

How to ping a network for testing connectivity. PagerDuty. (2021, November 19). Retrieved from https://www.pagerduty.com/resources/learn/ping-network-testing-connectivity/#:~:text=The%20Ping%20statistics%20section%20shows,times%20show%20the%20connection%20speed.

 Lag! top 5 reasons your ping is so high. HP® Tech Takes. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/5-reasons-your-ping-is-so-high#:~:text=Ping%20amounts%20of%20100%20ms,and%20deemed%20%E2%80%9Chigh%20ping.%E2%80%9D

Xfinity. (2020, March 25). Traceroute Command Overview. Xfinity Help & Support. Retrieved January 12, 2023, from https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/run-traceroute-command?view=app#:~:text=A%20traceroute%20is%20a%20network,diagnose%20where%20the%20problem%20is.

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.