Post #4 - Traveling Through a Network

 

    For this post I will be exploring the ping and trace route commands that can be utilized out of the command prompt window.  I will do a ping and trace route to three different sites to see the speed differences.  Two of the sites I do a ping and trace route to will be in different countries in order to see the difference that should be present when going over longer distances.

Ping Commands

 

    When I pinged google.com I sent over 4 packets. I did not lose any packets during the ping.  Each packet was 32bytes and took 62ms to complete the trip.  I received all 4 packets back from the ping.  All the packets traveled at the same speed so there was no variation between the packets.

 

    I did my second ping test to battlenet.jp.  I was surprised at the quick response I got from the server since it was faster than the response I got from the local google.com servers.  For the ping I sent 4 packets that were 32 bytes each.  Each packet took 51ms to complete the trip.  I received all 4 packets back from the ping to the server. There was a small variation in speeds between the 4 packets but he average was 51 seconds.

    The third ping I did was to battlenet.cn.  I noticed that the URL seems to have been redirected to overdue.aliyun.com.  I am not sure what that website is in china.  The ping to China was extremely quick compared to the other 2 pings.   All 4 packets that were sent were received and sent back.  The packets took 35ms to complete their trip.  There was no variation in the travel speeds of the packets.

 

Trace Route Commands

    I did 3 traceroutes from my work computer and all 3 came back with the same result.  We can see the traffic go to my local gateway and then to the router before getting lost.  I was expecting this result from the business network.  I am going to do 3 traceroutes from my home network so I can see the differences.

    This traceroute went to google.com there were a total of 8 hops.  As the traffic moved farther and farther away from me it took longer for the hops to confirm they have reached a destination.  Unlike the first traceroute I did there were no drops.

 

    This traceroute went to battlenet.jp and it took 18 hops to reach its destination.  Surprisingly once it got up to 48/49ms it did not continue to increase all that much.  Again there were no dropped packets for this traceroute.

    This last traceroute to battlenet.cn had 19 hops in it. Like with the ping the URL changed to overdue.aliyun.com.  this traceroute had a large increase from 35ms to 76ms at that 13^th hop.  I also see that there are 2 hops that timed out before the traffic reached its destination.

    Overall i found it very interesting that there was not a significant decrease in speed when i was leaving the country.  I fully expected that the ping speed would drop above 100 when I tried to go outside of the United States.