Traveling Through a Network

As mentioned by Vahid & Lysecky (2017), “a computer communicates via the internet by sending a packet, containing information like an address for a destination computer, the data size, and the data itself (Section 3.1). In the initial lesson of this discussion we were tasked with opening command prompt and pinging three websites (one domestic and two international). The first website that I pinged was google.com, the ping statistics of that one was 4 packets of data send and 4 packets of data received with 0% data loss, next I tried to ping google.com.au (Australian version of Google engine) and it had similar results, 4 packets of data was send and 4 packets of data was received; also the minimum is 38ms and the maximum is 83ms. Lastly, I tried Google India, the ping results for this was different from the other sites, with 4 packets of data sent only 2 packets of data were received with a 50% data loss. The reason there was some loss in this was because it timed out a couple of times.

In part two of this activity we were tasked with using the “tracert” function in command prompt to map out the packet of data that is being sent through the network to its destination. My initial observations were that when I typed the function “tracert” to google.com it did not take that long to trace the packet of data. When I tracerouted google.com.au there were stops along the way where it took more than 100ms. Lastly when I tracerouted google.co.in there were five stops that the packet of data took a long time to reach that specific IP address.

Figure I. (Pinging a website)  and Figure II. (Tracert function on a website)