Ping Me Later: Why Ping and Trace Route Are Essential PC Functions

 

    To begin, I will first briefly explain what the “ping” and “trace route” commands are. Using the ping option in a command prompt will send a series of packets to a destination internet protocol address and record the time it takes to get a response. It will also record if any of the packets were lost in the process, indicating some sort of error. Using the trace route (tracert) option in a command prompt sends packets of information to an internet protocol address and records the path that the packets take to get there. The ”hops” between the routers that the packet takes are listed below the command.

    My experience using these commands was interesting. The ping to google.com a very short amount of time to get a response packet, with only the last line taking over 6ms. Only when pinging news.com.au did the packets seem to take a little longer to respond, with the average being 19ms.  I had expected that each of the Australian websites would take longer, but ebay.com.au had similar response times to Google.

    When using the tracert command, each of the first few hops appeared to take the same route. The google.com results stayed within the United States, which I could determine by the name of the router hops, which included a city name and state abbreviation. Only when leaving the United States did the traces start to return different results. Each tracert to Australia hopped to an IP address that did not include city names or other values. Shortly after this, each tracert started to return “Request timed out” responses, before finally receiving a response packet and ending the trace.

    Because of the above results, my conclusion is that geographically closer routers will have faster response times overall. When the packets travel a greater distance, the response times will usually begin to take longer or completely time out, as was the case with both Australian websites.

    Both the ping and tracert commands can be used to troubleshoot internet connection problems. The ping command gives users the ability to see if they are having packet loss and to which websites they are getting the most loss. This can help troubleshoot a problem with internet in general. The tracert command lists the specific hops a packet takes as well as the time it takes to make the hop. If a router in the line of hops takes an abnormally long amount of time while the rest of the hops are quick, that indicates that there may be a problem with router that gave a long response. Using both of these commands will also return error results, such as “Request timed out” and other error responses. The request timed out error indicates that the packet was received by the destination, but did not get a response. This gives reason to believe that there may be a problem with the users network adapter or an intended blockage that the users firewall created. A tracert time out response can indicate heavy network traffic or other server problems.