Ping and Tracert

            Today I chose to ping and tracert nats.aero and zilliqa.io. NATS UK is the private company responsible for providing air traffic services to the UK and elsewhere. Zilliqa is a cryptocurrency based out of Singapore that I am heavily invested in.

            As you can see form the first image, www.google.com (Links to an external site.) was successfully pinged 4 times with 4 packets sent and no packet loss with times ranging from 35ms to 42ms. The nats.aero ping was similarly successful though the average time was much higher, at 154ms. The zilliqa.io ping was also successful with no packet loss and an average time of 60ms. The longer times taken for nats.aero and zilliqa.io makes sense given their global location in relation to my own (Albuquerque, NM). The relative length of this trip can be demonstrated through a tracert.

            As seen in the Nats.aero tracert image, there were a total of 10 hops, not including the two timed out requests. These timed out requests can occur for a number of reasons but the mostly likely in this case is an increased traffic load at the IP addresses that were later successfully. Tracert maps out the pathways by sending ICMP ping packets which tend to be assigned lower priority (or outright blocked by certain firewalls) (Susan, 2017). The routing of the packets was from my local network outward until it reach the regional Comcast router, then outbound to Los Angeles before hopping twice more to 66.155.26.134. In comparison, the Zilliqa.io tracert also made a total of 10 hops again routing through regional Comcast routers to Los Angeles before finally reaching 192.64.119.53.

            GeeksForGeeks explains that Ping “Is a utility that helps one to check if a particular IP address is accessible or not” and that it can also be used to see if computer on a local network are active. Traceroute, on the other hand, provides the exact route taken to reach the server and the time taken by each step. A reason why a ping might time out is because the IP address being pinged is unreachable – this could be for any number of reasons, including a lack/loss of internet connectivity between the computer pinging and the IP address being pined.