Post # 4

Week Three Interactive Assignment

In the week three interactive for packets traveling through a network, one of my peers expressed that he enjoyed reading my post and thought my breakdown of the results to help him understand it better. He noted that some packets timed out, making my results somewhat different than others he had read.

Ping and Traceroute are time tested troubleshooting tools that rely on sending signals through a medium to a destination on the internet. The trip is timed and and tracked through any number of hops. These hops are the number of routers and switches the signal has to traverse bi-directionally. If there are no issues there will be a clear indication of how long the trip took and  and indication of a time out is indicated when there is a failure.

 

I am posting my interactive for your approval:

We have all had opportunities to see connectivity failures in our networks - these failures can be problematic for businesses that rely on internet connectivity for the livelihood of their commerce. 

Network engineers and technicians have tools that can verify connectivity speed and the number of hops required for data packets to travel from their point of origin to their final destination. Latency is the unwanted variable that users and technicians alike want to rid their networks of most often. 

Using Ping and Traceroute to determine the speed and routes of packets can be analogous to using a multi-meter to perform a continuity test on a wire and then having specialized devices linked by that wire also tested. This analogy is a simplistic way of looking at the processes, but sometimes, simple explanations can go a long way to explain the complexity of things. 

Both Ping and Traceroute can sometimes fail due to loose or missing connections at the destination or a faulty wire within the cable. Another cause of failure could be incorrect IP addresses on the devices at the destination or along the way to the destination.

Ping

I used Ping to test Google.com, BBC.co.uk, and Rakuten.co.jp; the results varied because each website belonged to different world regions. The round trip for Google took an average of 18 milliseconds with a maximum journey of 36 milliseconds. The ping of the BBC site produced an average trip time of 13 milliseconds with a max time of 14 milliseconds. The pinging of the Japanese site Rakuten produced round an average round trip time of 121 milliseconds with a maximum time of 122 milliseconds. 

Traceroute

Traceroute and ping differ in that ping merely provides a means to determine continuity between sending and destination points. At the same time, Traceroute provides the number of hops (number of routers accessed) on the way to and from the destination. Vahid, & Lysecky (2017).

The Traceroute to Google in the United States yielded a result of 14 hops at a maximum time of 39 milliseconds. The same command sending inquiries to the British Broadcast Company (BBC), a United Kingdom site, yielded 25 milliseconds in 11 hops. Then a Traceroute to Rakuten, a Japanese site, produced a result of 163 milliseconds in 18 hops. These results are consistent with other results from similar Traceroute requests, except for the number of hops and the time required to complete the journey.  

The Traceroute and Ping commands are powerful tools used to provide assurances of network integrity. Without these commands, Network Engineers would have to visit each component and find ways to sense the presence of the number of devices along the travel path -- an impossible task given the number of networks worldwide.  

Reference:

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017), Computing technology for all. Retrieved from zybooks.zyante.com/