Post 4 - Traveling Through a Network

This post was originally an assignment done in week 3 of the class:

Using a ping and traceroute command utility are two different ways to analyze how packets move through the Internet. Packets are the units which information is broken down in to send from one computer to another (Vahid, 2017). Each packet is made up of a maximum of 1500 bytes (Strickland, 2010). This means that transmitting a web site, a song, or even an email is being split amongst multiple packets. This is also a strength of the Internet over previous forms of communication that were a single direct line. If one route or line fails there are multiple other routes that the packet can take to reach its destination. The process of pinging refers to checking if the destination is receiving a signal, it’s like checking to see if someone is home. Traceroute goes along the route that the packet follows from origination to destination, and reports on the amount of time at each router the packet passes through as well as the IP address of each router and if there were any issues along the way. Each transmission between routers in the traceroute is referred to as a hop (Hoffman, 2017).

For the assignment I used google.com, as well as the website for the Australian government (Australia.gov.au) and a popular site in China (sina.com.cn).  For the pinging exercise the website hosted in China took the longest, while the domestic Google site was much faster and the Australian government site was slightly less time, but comparable to the Chinese website. However, when doing the traceroute exercise, both Google and sina.com.cn were able to complete the task in less than 20 hops, however the traceroute for the Australian site consistently timed out after about 14 hops. This is indicated by the triple asterisk in the output of the screenshot. I tried the exercise multiple times to confirm. This can mean that the website router is too busy or has exceeded the time threshold needed to respond to the traceroute call. It can also mean that there is a firewall blocking requests. Since the website in the traceback exercise is a government site, it’s likely that this is the case since traditionally hackers have used traceroutes to study how data moved on a network and then target vulnerabilities: “In the past, computer hackers would routinely use traceroutes to map how information moved within a company's computer network and then focus their attacks on certain computers. To combat that security threat, some networks will not allow you to perform a traceroute” (What is a Traceroute?, 2019).

Example ping:

 Example traceroute:

References:

  

Hoffman, C. (2017, July 6). How to Use Traceroute to Identify Network Problems. Retrieved from https://www.howtogeek.com/134132/how-to-use-traceroute-to-identify-network-problems/.

Mitchell, S. (n.d.). How to Read a Traceroute, InMotion Hosting Support Center. Retrieved from https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/uncategorized/read-traceroute/.

Strickland, J. (2010, March 8). How IP Convergence Works. Retrieved from https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ip-convergence2.htm.

What is a traceroute? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://whatismyipaddress.com/traceroute

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017). Computing technology for all. Retrieved from  zybooks.zyante.com/