Packets and Their Travel

 Looking at how packets are sent through a network and their travel- 

 

First, I pinged and tracerouted the following sites uagc.edu, amazon.co.jp, and lastly gov.uk to get these screenshot results: 

Ping activity results for uagc.edu: Packets sent is 4, received is 4, and there were 0 lost. It did not fail before reaching its destination. Additionally, the range had a minimum of 60ms, and maximum of 60ms, and averaged at 60ms round trip response speed. 

 

Trace route activity for uagc.edu: The packets pass through 25 routers, however as you can see, it fails many times before reaching its destination. Additionally, it ranges from 1ms-60ms before reaching the next router. The more routers that it must travel though, the longer it takes. 

 

Ping activity for amazon.co.jp: Packets sent 4, received 4, and 0 were lost. Round trip time equals 61ms. 

 

Traceroute activity for amazon.co.jp: The packets pass through 16 routers, hop time ranges from 1ms to 60ms. The request was timed out many times before reaching its destination. 

 

 

Ping activity for gov.uk: packets sent 4, received 4, and none lost. The range of response was quick at 13ms. 

 

Traceroute activity for gov.uk: Passes through 5 routers, it took between 1ms and 13ms to hop between each router.  

What I learned: 

 Computers send out information in small data packets that travel through several routers until the data reaches its destination. A Ping checks if a website is available, while a traceroute is used to trace the route or path of the packets, mapping out its travel through the network until it gets to its desired location.  

After checking the Ping results of three separate websites, all were the exact same. Each website had 4 packages sent, all 4 received, and there were 0 packets lost.  
However, the TTL or time to live changed between all three. The uagc.edu TTL was only 52, the United Kingdom, gov.uk came in at a TTL of 60, and lastly amazon.co.jp came in with a result of 240 TTL. This difference is due to Japan being so distant and, in another country, across the world, therefore the TTL would have been higher and have a longer time allotted before timing out. Interestingly, the response speed was quick and only a millisecond slower than that of the uagc.edu website. The traceroute results came in quite different from one another as each had its own distinct number of routers to pass through, which differed from one another and additionally, the UK government website was much quicker, ran through less routers, and was the only one without any failure during delivery. I believe fully that the reason here is that the actual website is in fact a government URL. The geographic location of Japan did seem to play a role on the allotted time it took for the packets to arrive, reach their destination, and how many failures occurred before their final arrival as well. 

Ping commands can also be used to troubleshoot, it can detect issues both on your local and wider internet. You can use ping to check your local and wider internet to see where a problem is and if there is a problem with the network. After detecting the issue, you can then figure out who's end the issue is on, your local or wider network. Trace route can be used to understand internet problems, including packet loss and high latency. If ping or trace route returns with an error, it can be caused by a couple different things including one your router is acting up and two you are too far from the server. There are several reasons, however these are two of the more common reasons and ones that I myself have experienced.