Traveling Through a Network!


 Hey there! Loons here!


Today, I want to share my experience with ping and traceroute commands! Anyone can do this. It is a fun activity, provided they have a PC to do so! Its simplicity makes it fun, especially since you can plug in any website. I sat down with my nine-year-old and had him pick any site he could think of, and we had fun watching the traceroute do its thing. This knowledge helped both of us learn and grow. This experience has been excellent and is a great way to illustrate the difference between ping and traceroute and what they can accomplish. Let's get into it!


 When it comes to ping and traceroute, I like to think of it as sending a letter. With ping, you can see the interaction between two different parties or hosts. So, with ping, you can tell how long it's taking for your information to travel between parties. This would be like counting the days it takes for your letter to get from you to its destination or vice versa. Traceroute, on the other hand, is like getting detailed tracking information from UPS. You can see what stops it makes on its way to its destination. You're also able to see how long it took between each of these stops and what may have happened in between them. I could watch the path from my router to my local ISP, to all the minor stops along the way, and finally to its destination. The further away the destination was from my current location, the frequency of timeouts seemed to increase. While these things are essentially traveling at light speed, it's clear that the geographical location affects speed/latency. This is not due to speed, but the number of bottlenecks and distance traveled that comes with a connection farther away.


These basic ideas also come into play when discussing what these can accomplish via troubleshooting. Ping, for instance, could be used to troubleshoot basic network issues, like seeing if a device is even connected to the network or if the information is getting to that device. Traceroute, on the other hand, could be used to figure out more complex issues. For example, if you couldn't access a particular website, you could see where the failure was happening. Or if you were trying to determine where a bottleneck was when attempting to reach a site in another country. That bottleneck could be incorrect network configurations or even just network congestion. You might run into an error message or a timeout on a Traceroute because of a firewall setting. If the information can't get through, it's just like the mail truck hitting a brick wall, so there isn't much information to be gained. Another reason could be that the server has the wrong default gateway. Simply put, it could mean you're not getting an internet connection, the server you're reaching isn't, or your device is not allowing information to flow through.

If you would like to try ping and traceroute commands, follow these simple steps!

To ping on a Windows operating system, you:

1. Right-click the Start menu and click Run.

2. Type cmd into the textbox and click OK.

3. In the command prompt, type ping, then a space, and then the specific domain name/IP address.

4. Press Enter.


To run a traceroute on a Windows operating system, you:

1. Right-click the Start menu and click Run.

2. Type cmd into the textbox and click OK.

3. In the command prompt, type tracert, then a space, and then the specific domain name/IP

address.

4. Press Enter.

5. Have FUN!

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