Traveling Through a Network
Ping
This is always a fun activity. I used to do support for the @Home cable modem product back in the InterMedia days of early cable modems. I have not done a ping or traceroute in a long time. I used to do this as part of troubleshooting customer issues in those early days of what is now the Xfinity XFi product in Nashville. I would do a ping to see the response time to the domain in question to see if there were any issues simply getting there. Ping and how it works is defined on the Microsoft website as “Verifies IP-level connectivity to another TCP/IP computer by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo Request messages.” . It sends a message and the location responded, kind of like a bat and echolocation. What is the time it took to make that round trip is what you get back. I pinged Google.com, BBC.co.uk, and Infocubic.co.jp and I found some interesting results.
- Google Average: 20ms
- BBC.co.uk: 20ms
- Infocubic.co.jp: 178ms
This was interesting to me as both the BBC and Google had similar response times. With Great Britain being “across the pond” as they say, I expected it to be a higher number. If I was going to take a wild guess at this point in the activity it would be that it is possible that the BBC site has a mirror in the United States.
Tracert
The tracert command shows a route that it takes to reach the destination jumping across servers and measuring their response . When I did this activity I was further surprised by the results. I had a lot of errors going to Google and very few hops getting to the BBC UK website. The route it took to get to Japan was a bit more of what I had anticipated. A lot more jumps and a lot of time to get there. The lack of hops for the BBC UK website and the response and how close they were as hop 5 was in Goodlettsville TN, which is just northwest of me by a 45-minute drive, and then hop 6 was in Marietta, GA. There were only 2 hops after and I would almost bet that those last 2 hops were also in the United States.
A reason a tracert or ping might fail could be that a server is down and as such is unresponsive. Another reason might be problems with the network condition itself between the locations. If a country controls its backbone for all internet traffic flowing into their borders they may also have the site blocked. It could fail if the IP address of the location changed and the DNS has not updated. There are many reasons that it could fail.
It is a useful troubleshooting tool as it can point to a failure locally. If the response times leaving your own city are bad it could mean a call to your ISP to see if there are issues.
References
Fisher, T. (2020, September 11). Tracert Command. Lifewire. https://www.lifewire.com/tracert-command-2618101
Microsoft. (2018, July 11). ping. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/ping
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