Ping Activity
Google.comRepublic of Serbia - mfa.gov.rs
Zimbabwe - parlzim.gov.zw
Traceroute Activity
Google.com
Republic of Serbia - mfa.gov.rs
Zimbabwe - parlzim.gov.zw
By sending small packets of information, a computer can communicate with other computers through a network—these small packets of information run through routers to their destination. A PING is a utility tool you can use to check for a response from a destination. By PINGing, you run a call and response as small packets are sent to specific IP addresses. The destination will acknowledge that it received the ping by sending an echo reply to the packet. You can record information about the ping, including the total round trip time of packets and the number of packets sent, received, and lost. This command is useful for a quick test to see if a destination IP is reachable and, if so, how long it takes to reach.
I found the ping test interesting; when I used to game on MMOs if someone was lagging, we would do a simple “ping” test in chat to check the lag time. One user said “Ping” in chat, and the person lagging would respond with “ping” as soon as they saw it. This was used to see their call and response time. Learning the ping command gave me perspective on where this simple test came from!
A traceroute is a more in-depth command that traces the path small packets take to reach the destination site and logs the routers the sent packets go through. It also logs the "hop" - the time between each router. This command can be useful to see where a transmission has failed if it cannot reach the destination.
The fastest ping was from google.com, the second with almost 5x as long was the Republic of Serbia government site (.rs), and the slowest was the Zimbabwe government website (.zw) at almost 6.5x as long as the ping to Google. Traceroute-wise, the hops between routers to Google.com were all between 1-31ms, while the hops between routers to .rs and .zw spiked from 1-30ms around the 4th hop to between 160-200ms a hop with a few requests timing out at routers.
Geographically, Zimbabwe is the farthest from my location and was the slowest to be reached; Serbia is about 2/3rd the distance as Zimbabwe and was faster, but was still slow to be reached as both destinations were hosted on servers overseas. Google was the quickest to be reached as it is on Servers in the US.
Part of my current job is working with "Discovery", which is a tool that finds devices on our network for our CMDB. If Discovery is unable to find a device on the network, the ping command is a great way to check if a device is active on the network and what the call and response time would be from my PC or the Server Discovery is running on. A traceroute command could be of great use in this scenario to find where an issue may be occurring by running a traceroute from our Discovery server to the device and seeing where the failure to connect is occurring.
A Ping command or Traceroute may return a timeout or fail if a router is configured not to return information or does not accept the packets sent to it or if the server that is hosting the Website is offline.
