Traveling Through a Network: Ping/Traceroute

 I executed a  ping and a traceroute for google.com, yahoo.co.jp, and spiegel.de. The end of these domains indicate the country these websites are being hosted in. For example, ".jp" indicates that the website is being hosted by Japan while ".de" indicates that the website is hosted in Germany (It is ".de" because in German, the country is named Deutschland).

I started by running a ping for each of the websites. a relation I was able to find was that each ping sent out 4 packets and received 4 packets, which mean not a single one was lost in the process, although the time differed depending on the country. Since I am in the U.S., the ping on google.com was the quickest at between 31 and 36 milliseconds per round trip with an average of 33. After that was Japan with between 161 and 163 milliseconds for an average of 161 milliseconds per round trip; and Germany staying between 128 and 131 milliseconds with an average of 128 milliseconds. The meaning to this is very simple, the farther the host country, the longer the round trip. 

Essentially, when the command to ping is executed, an echo request packet is sent to the host; after it is received, an echo reply is sent back. But what is and echo request and an echo reply? Basically, these echo requests are used to see if a system is on the network and functional, a reply confirms the functionality from the host. If the system you're trying to reach doesn't exist, isn't powered on, or isn't connected to the network, an error will be returned. The ping test can identify connectivity between two network connections, often as a troubleshooting tool. Below are the pings sent:

Traceroute on the other hand was a much longer process than ping as its goal was to trace the route a packet takes between your computer and the destination computer. One similarity noticed was that all three traceroutes timed out at least twice during the process with Japan timing out three times. If the host is not on a directly attached network, an error is returned. The traceroute test checks the path that the computer is using to connect to the network.