Traveling Through a Network

The ping and traceroute activities showed me how packets travel through the network by hopping from multiple addresses until reaching the destination. Besides Google, I chose Volkswagen.de in Germany and Takamineguitars.co.jp in Japan for my destinations in this activity. I thought this would help me see how geographic location plays into ping and traceroute results. Starting with the destination closest to me, I sent four packets to Google in the United States with an average of 156ms ping. I also sent four packets to Volkswagen in Germany with a longer average ping of 255ms. Takamine in Japan had the longest average ping of 342ms. The average ping times correspond to the geographical distances of the destinations from my location. My ping results below:

 

The traceroute activity was interesting because it showed me how many contacts it took for the packets to reach their destination. In the case of Google, I am not sure exactly where the location of the final destination is, but judging by the ping results from each hop, the packets look like they might be following a convoluted route because the last set of pings for the three packets were faster than some of the previous hops. This was not the case with Volkswagen or Takamine, which show a general increase in ping times the closer my packets get to their destination (and the further they get from me). Interestingly, all three traceroutes timed out on similar hops. Hops 3-6 timed out on each of my traceroute attempts. This tells me that my packets probably follow the same route up to the seventh hop, where the paths diverge toward their unique destinations. It also suggests that the routers at those locations are not responding to my requests. Maybe a firewall or something is blocking my IP and preventing my packets from routing through those points. Perhaps the facilities hosting those routers are not operating correctly. There have been some storms and high winds in my region lately, so it might be possible that part of my network is affected. It would be interesting and possibly helpful to know exactly where those locations are because they appear to be broken links in my network. My traceroute results below: