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Ping and Traceroute

 

PING

Ping is used to check if a website is reachable. When pinging a website, packets are sent through the network via routers to a destination server and if it goes through without interruption, that destination sends back an acknowledgment response. That response will include data about the ping, such as the number of packets sent and the time in milliseconds that it took to send and receive back that acknowledgment response for each packet. It will also show if any of the packets sent did not make it to its destination.I pinged two different websites, one being News.com.au out in Australia and Rakuten.co.jp in Japan. Both pings sent 4 packets and none were lost as shown below.

 

However, I did notice that one of the packets from the Australian site took significantly longer than the other 3. The same thing happened to the website out of Japan, but the time difference wasn’t as significant. As far as the two, the Australian site took an average of 82ms and the Japanese site had an average of 141ms. So, it took a bit longer to get a response from the Japanese site.


Traceroute

Traceroute is primarily used to show the path or the hops the data packets took and went through to reach a specific destination. Below are examples of two traceroutes using the same websites as the pings.


Like the pings, it took significantly longer to get back the hop responses when doing a traceroute on the Japanese site vs the Australian site. I assumed that it was due to a farther distance as the Japanese site attempted to go through 18 hops and the Australian site had only 10, but Japan is in fact closer to my location than Australia. So, my assumption is that the network traffic to Japan was higher than that of Australia and the traceroute had to take a longer route to get to its destination. Overall, I would say that the farther the distance packets have to travel the longer the response time will be due to it going it farther distance.

 

Ping and Traceroute in Troubleshooting 

Ping and traceroute commands can be useful for troubleshooting as they can show whether the commands are making it to its destination or not, aiding in identifying potential network issues. If a ping has failed packets, that could be an indicator of a poor signal or internet connection. Traceroute can be beneficial as it will show if a hop has a higher millisecond time, and if it does, that could be an indicator of an issue with that particular router. Some possible reasons why a command request would time out or get an error are due to high traffic which might cause a delay and time out, or something as simple as not typing the domain name or IP address correctly which would result in an error and finally, having an unstable network connection can lead to timeouts as well.


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