I may be a computer hacker now!
Ok, I confess! I am not a computer hacker!
But I sure felt like one completing this assignment for my IT course.
So I was tasked with creating a ping and traceroute command.
A ping command sends a packet of information to a website and waits for a response.
Think of it like you're playing a 2-person game of catch with a side of hot potato. You toss a ball to the person, they toss it back to you as quickly as they can, and you measure the time it took for them to respond to your throw… in milliseconds!
A traceroute command sends packets of information, and you receive a report of the routers the packets passed through.
Think about when you book a cheap airline flight somewhere and the itinerary lists all the stops and layovers before you reach your destination (And there are a lot of layovers). But this report happens in real time… in milliseconds!
I posted the results of my ping and traceroute commands below with screenshots.
I noticed my pings took longer for Japan (7,161 mi from me) and Australia (10,252 mi from me) and subsequently the same for my traceroute commands. The path to Japan traveled west from Miami, FL, Houston, TX, Dallas, TX and then to Japan, taking about 98ms to complete. The path to Australia traveled west as well but went through Marietta, GA, Houston, TX, Los Angeles, CA, Sydney, and then to Canberra, Australia. After that the packets were potentially lost. But based on the given information, I can conclude that the distance from the sender to the destination does affect the round trip time.
My significant other and I are traveling to Japan in January. He is excited about the free wi-fi. But after reviewing the time it took for a response from Google and Japan. I hope that they are working with some decent bandwidth. Secondly, I hope I don’t end up on Australia’s watch list for pinging their government page. I don’t know if it was just the website that kept failing or if it's behind a firewall. I also noticed that my packets began to fail after they made it to the country. So I’m leaning towards a firewall block because of it being a government website and they need that kind of security.
Ping and traceroute commands can troubleshoot internet connection problems because you can identify a general location where packet loss occurred. There may not be a problem in my region (East Coast) but there could be problems on the West Coast which could explain why I am seeing a lot of timeouts after the packets hopped to a few servers in the region. A ping or traceroute command may time out or return with an error response because of a firewall or the site’s server I am trying to reach is not connected to the internet at that time.
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