For week 3 of INT100, we were assigned to interact with websites via ping and traceroute commands. On this assignment, I was able to utilize the knowledge I have about ping and traceroute from what I already learned years ago. Using the ping command is a good way to determine if your connectivity to a particular site is active or down. It can also be used to see if your internet connection is poor by pinging several sites and seeing how long a packet took to reach its destination or how often the ping times out. Traceroute is a good way to see how your site request travels throughout a network. Both of these commands are not just for use on websites, they can be utilized on devices on a private network as well. As long as a device has an IP address or a secured DNS (Domain Name System) name, a name given to a device or website that is easy for a person to memorize, anyone can use these commands to access network traffic to those devices (cloudflare.com).
Packets travel through a network via a wrapper that contains a header and a footer. Within the wrapper, there is information about the origin of the packet, the kind of data in the packet, and its final destination. When data is sent out, that data is split into different packets that do not have to follow the same path, and thus makes the networks, such as the Internet, fast. Once the packets reach their destination, the receiver reassembles the data and recreates the originally transmitted data (Strickland).
Other than Google.com, I chose Nintendo's Japanese site at nintendo.co.jp and DHL's German site at dhl.de. The ping request had no issues with time outs or dropped packets. What I did notice is that the sites outside of the country took longer for the packets to reach their destination. Packets sent to Google averaged around 13.6 milliseconds (ms) to reach their server, Nintendo averaged 15.7ms, and DHL averaged 128.1ms. The results tell me that the servers used by Google and Nintendo are more robust and have better bandwidth paths that DHL has.
The traceroute results were a real eye-opener for me. I have run traceroutes before, but I had some mixed results from Nintendo and DHL. When I ran a traceroute to Google, I had no issue getting the full path to their site, but with Nintendo and DHL, traces were being rerouted to a content delivery network (CDN) called Akamai. Once the trace reached a certain point for Nintendo and DHL, it would time out. If I were to use my best guess, I think Nintendos trace reached a server near O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, due to the partial DNS name segment "ord01"; ORD is the city code for O'Hare Airport. The trace for DHL went to London England and then to Paris France where it reached an Akamai server before timing out. It looks like Nintendo and DHL decided to host their content on Akamai's servers to minimize delays in loading their web page content (akamai.com).
I mentioned how ping and traceroute commands can be used to troubleshoot Internet connection problems, but if a user is curious if their internet connection is out completely, you can find out by pinging or tracerouting multiple sites. If all pings time out or you receive a message of "Destination Host Unreachable," and your traceroutes do not go past the first hop, chances are your internet is down. On occasion, connectivity to servers either drops or lags, and when running ping/traceroute commands, there will be time outs or errors. There are various reasons why ping and traceroute commands time out or return an error response, which includes server or network router failures, excess traffic to destinations, not enough bandwidth from an internet service provider, and a possible Denial of Service attack on a website.
I use ping and traceroute commands often for work to see if connectivity is down for a remote server. I also use traceroute to find names of switches/routers that servers are connected to. Some time ago, my team had a connectivity issue with a server in Rushford MN, and we were getting dropped packets to the server. The fix was a reboot of the modem that the firewall connects to. Another reason why errors might occur in a ping/traceroute is that the server you are trying to access is disconnected from the network or is powered off. In some cases, the IP or DNS name is wrong.
Resources
akamai.com(N.D.) What does a CDN stand for? CDN Definition
Retrieved 9/23/2020 from:
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/cdn/what-is-a-cdn.jsp
cloudflare.com(N.D.) What is DNS | How DNS Works
Retrieved 9/23/2020 from:
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-dns/
Strickland, J (N.D.) How IP COnvergence Works
Retrieved 9/23/2020 from:
https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ip-convergence2.htm
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