Post #4 – Traveling Through a Network

 

Using the ping and tracert commands on google.com, scootle.edu.au, and cned.fr helped me understand how data packets travel through networks, revealing how latency and network paths are influenced by geography and infrastructure.

When pinging each site, I observed that google.com had an average roundtrip time of 9 milliseconds, with all four packets sent and received successfully and no packet loss. Scootle.edu.au, although based in Australia, showed an even lower average latency of 8 milliseconds, again with no packet loss. This surprisingly fast response is likely due to local content delivery network (CDN) caching via Cloudflare, which hosts copies of the website closer to my location. On the other hand, cned.fr, located in France, had a much higher average roundtrip time of 100 milliseconds, showing how physical distance and more routing complexity contribute to increased latency.

Traceroute results provided even more detail. For google.com, the command traced the route through 21 hops. While the destination was eventually reached with a response time of 8 milliseconds, several hops from step 12 to 20 timed out, which may be due to intermediate routers or firewalls blocking ICMP requests. Scootle.edu.au was reached efficiently in just 8 hops with consistent response times around 19 milliseconds and no timeouts, confirming a direct and optimized path. In contrast, cned.fr required 22 hops, with multiple timeouts along the way, and reached the destination with a higher latency of approximately 126 milliseconds, indicating a longer and potentially more congested route.

These tests demonstrate a clear relationship between geographic location and roundtrip time. Typically, the farther the server, the longer the latency. However, CDNs can significantly reduce response times by hosting content closer to users. The ping command is useful for checking if a host is reachable and measuring basic latency, while traceroute is invaluable for identifying where along a route delays or failures are occurring.

Timeouts in these commands can happen for several reasons. One common cause is ICMP blocking, where firewalls or routers refuse to respond to ping or traceroute requests. Another possible reason is network congestion or a hardware issue at a specific point in the path, resulting in dropped packets or failed responses. Including screenshots of the command prompt output provides supporting evidence of these results.