Ping & Traceroute: Simple Commands to Diagnose a Network
We use the internet everyday to connect to various networks, whether for work, school, or just personal use such as social media or ordering food online. Sometimes the network we are trying to reach may be sluggish or cannot be connected to at all. To help diagnose network issues, you can make use of the cmd application on your computer to send data packages to the website you want to reach and evaluate the networks conditions. Below I use the cmd application to send a ping and traceroute command to a few websites from various places in the world.
Ping Activity
The First website I pinged was Google.com. In running this ping test, four packets were sent and received with a 0% loss. The average roundtrip time was 25ms.
| Ping to Google.com |
Next, I ran a ping test on an Australian pizza website called dukepizza.com.au. This test sent and received four packets with a 0% loss. The roundtrip for this website was much slower at an average time of 200ms.
| Ping to Duke Pizza in Australia |
Finally, I ran a ping test on the University of Tokyo website at u-tokyo.ac.jp. In this test, four packets were sent, but none received a response, making a 100% loss. Because no response was received, I cannot provide a roundtrip time.
| Ping to the University of Tokyo in Japan |
Traceroute Activity
In my traceroute tests to the same websites from my above ping test, I noticed increasing hops and times the further away the final destination was. In my examples, I also noticed that the further away the destination, the more likely the route timed out. Even with some routers timing out, in two of my examples, the destination was reached, as shown in the final hop. One of my examples that included a route to a Japanese website failed, as seen by the final hop timing out. My results are shown below.
| Traceroute to Google.com |
| Traceroute to Duke Pizza in Australia |
| Traceroute to the University of Tokyo in Japan |
Traveling Through a Network Reflection Essay
Using the ping and traceroute commands, you more easily identify how packets are sent from one computer through modems until they reach the requested IP address location. It is similar to how a physical package may be delivered to your house, except in the case of a data packet, it is more of a roundtrip. Looking at the ping and traceroute examples above, I notice that the farther away the web server is, the slower the trip. In each example of the traceroutes the closer routers took less time to travel than the farther router hops. In one of my traceroute tests, I had my computer send packets to a Japanese-based server at the University of Tokyo. Based on the test, you can see that the packet did not appear to make it to the server, as the final hop shows the request timed out. In the case of the University of Tokyo webpage, I was still able to navigate it, so I wondered why the packet showed as timed out. After a bit of research, it appears that the packet did make it. However, the servers are not obliged to send a packet back, thus showing the timed-out message. It could also be the case that the server has a firewall in place as protection, as some DDoS attacks flood the server with packets to bring it down (Park, 2023).
Final thoughts
As shown above, one reason a ping or traceroute request might time out is because of a firewall the server is using to protect itself. This may be a common case for schools, offices, and any server that belongs to a secure or private company. Similarly, a VPN may be preventing a traceroute or ping from properly being sent back. Another reason a packet may time out is network traffic congestion, though this appears to be less common. The ping command will help you identify if a server is reachable, while a traceroute will help you troubleshoot exactly where in the route you are having connectivity issues.
References
Park, B. (2023, November 15). Tracert Request Timed Out: What It Means And How To Fix It. NameHero. https://www.namehero.com/blog/tracert-request-timed-out-what-it-means-and-how-to-fix-it/
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