Using
Ping and Trace Route is a great way to troubleshoot a network to see if the
communication error is on the client or server sides. For example, if you
open Google Chrome to a page and it won't open, you may want to ping the
website to see if it is even responding. This may only work if the
website has not turned off ping response because they fear ping attacks.
One such attack could be a DDoS attack, where a hacker wants to disrupt the
server and will send abnormally large packets in the hopes of crashing the
server. All data travels through networks as small packets of
information, like a train with all the train cars connected to the
engine. All files are broken up into packets, with a main packet with
detailed information on how to assemble the file. Referencing my three
ping results, two of the three had an under 30s average response, but the third
site had a ping of 172ms, which is slow. Gamers are always checking the
ping to servers because the higher the ping, the slower the response and more
lag, which gives the players, with a lower ping, the advantage.
Looking at the
traceroute results, you can see that all of mine had time-outs during the
process. The most obvious conclusion is that some firewall protections
are hindering responses to some of the servers to protect them from
intrusion. However, the other possibility is that the request took too
long to respond, so it time out and moved on to the next request. The
response times to the different networks were reasonably fast, indicating that
there wasn't much traffic when collecting the data. You can compare this
traffic to a freeway speeding along, but then you hit a congested city at rush
hour, then everything slows down. Based on my results, the geographical
locations didn't seem to matter too much for the traceroute, but it did show a
little difference when pinging Russia compared to the U.S. and Argentina.
Here
are my ping results for three different countries.
United States -
4 packets sent, 4 packets received // average round trip was 28 ms
Russia - 4 packets sent, 4 packets received // average round trip was 172ms
Argentina - 4 packets sent, 4 received // average round trip was 22ms
Here are my trace routes to the same websites -
United States -
This traceroute was run to www.google.com and shows 23 hops. 10 of those 23
timed out, which could indicate that the server had security setup, so it
couldn't respond to the requests. The hops that show responses took a few
seconds per hop, but when it started timing out, it would take around 30
seconds before moving on to the next one.
Russia - This trace route to a russia site called yandex.ru shows 7 hops until it starts timing out for 10 hops. There was a response at hop 18 and then it timed out again for two more before reaching the final destination.
Aregentina - A trace route to mercadonibre.com.ar was the shorts of the three with a total of 12 hops. The first five hops took mere seconds to complete and the timed out for the next 6 without about 30s per hop trying to get a response and then it reached the final destination.
References
phoenixNAP | Global IT Services. (n.d.). Online Ping
Traceroute Test IP Utility Tool | phoenixNAP [Image]. In phoenixNAP | Global
IT Services. Retrieved May 10, 2024, from
https://phoenixnap.com/network/speed-test
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