Traveling Through a Network:
Hello Everyone,
Here are my ping response times including google.com and sites from Japan and Australia. As you can see, the turnaround time averages in the 10ms range.
I have recently had GoNetSpeed Fiber installed and have been pleased with the response times and low jitter rate. As this is a growing ISP, I have found that when they add routers and switches, I often had to re-boot my router to pick up new routing tables and refresh it, however that has started to settle down now that they have canvassed my local area and the hardware at the last mile has been built up.
For the trace routes to the same sites, you can see the path, where the packets leave my computer and head out over my router. The gateway there is the 10.0.0.1 address which is a nice scheme that is commonly used if 192.168.1.1 is not available. After that lightower.net is my last mile provider and then the traces hop off over the internet through different routers to get to their destinations.
Insert screen shots here.
What is interesting in my ping
results is that the average turnaround time for Google was the slowest as
compared to those sites in other countries.
As the 40ms time was an outlier the averages were all around the 10ms
mark making it difficult to determine time differences compared to the other
side of the world. However, the tracert
results show the different paths taken.
This tells me that my current provider’s speeds and those of the routers
between here and there are comparable and fiber optics are very fast. You will note that there are time outs listed
on my trace to Australia. This can be
caused by the ping function not being enabled on a switch or router along the
way. This is common practice to keep
hackers from determining critical information about a network. Other reasons for this could be a slow
network connection that doesn’t respond in time, or an out-of-date DNS entry
pointing to an IP address that isn’t currently being used. Both Ping and Tracert are very handy tools
for troubleshooting. Ping is very simple
and can let us know if a machine is online.
If there is no ping response though it does not mean that the machine is
offline, it merely means that the computer issuing the command is not receiving
a response from the destination host, which could be for any number of
reasons.
The tracert function can tell us a
little more. If we trace by IP it will
attempt to resolve the host name of the computer for us. This is important as we can compare what the DNS
server returns vs what the machine is addressed at. If this doesn’t match it can indicate a stale
DNS record. If it matches and the trace
stops at some point it will show how far along the path we can get and possibly
point to a failed switch or router along the way that is interrupting the path
back and forth between the devices.
Other things that may cause issues
are firewalls blocking ping traffic, as well as computers that have the ping
service turned off. A failed network
adapter may keep the computer from connecting, or a broken or severed
cable. There are many things that can
keep a device from communicating back, but there are also a number of commands
and tools to find out where the break in communications is.
I hope this is helpful in
troubleshooting for you.
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