Traveling Through a Network

 I chose to ping and trace a couple sites in Australia, a news site and the Australian government site. First was the ping of the new site. 

All four packets were sent and received, there was no loss at all. So that means the site is up and running well. Had I had one or more packets that timed out it might mean that maybe the destination device could be offline, not configured right, or may just be powered off. 

I tried another ping test with the Australian government’s page. I received the same results all four packets sent and all four received. 

Even with these servers possibly being pretty much on the other side of the earth they still were sent and received rather quickly. 

Next was the traceroute command. This one will show all the nodes the packets hit on its way to its destination. This test can help identify if there may be an issue with an ISP’s server or network in between yourself and the website you are trying to connect to. Here the news sites traceroute was successful and shows where it went. 

But the Australian governments website shows some weird activity after a few hops on its trip. 

It shows there were some hops where it seems there was an issue and the requests timed out. But after a few hops that timed out it shows a successful hop at the end. Some people may look at this and think there was an issue and maybe some of the ISPs or maybe servers were having problems. But there could also be something like a firewall or maybe even a VPN that is blocking the traceroute at that hop. Seeing something like this does not immediately mean there is a problem. It just means that maybe some more research or troubleshooting might be needed.