Through The Internet

Through The Internet

Before proceeding, have a look at the video....

Traceroute:

Following are the steps which one can follow to get familiar with the traceroute program:

• If you are using Windows, open the command prompt.

• Type in the command tracert google.com

• You can type any destination address like 'yahoo.com' , 'blogger.com' etc. Also the command may vary depending upon which OS you are using.

• From here on the program will do the rest of the work.

• Here is a screenshot of the output.Lets try to understand it.

• As you can see after the command is typed in, the next row displays the server name (google.com) followed by its address [216.58.203.174]

• The next line indicates that the program will log records for maximum 30 nodes (routers or end systems).

• The main output has five columns, the first being the number of router along the route.Technically, they represent TTL (Time To Live) of the packets sent by traceroute program. TTL prevents the packets from being forwarded till the destination.

• The second column is the time elapsed from the instant packet is sent till the message arrives back to client PC (have a look at the video for better understanding) in milliseconds.

• Actually three packets are sent to each router instead of one and the round-trip time required for subsequent two packets is logged into the third and fourth column.

• The fifth column displays the address of the router.

• In above output we can see that there are 12 routers between our client and the server.

• At the 13th hop the destination address is reached.

• The second output displays ' Request Timed Out ' error which implies that the router has blocked ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) traffic and doesn't respond to requests for information.

• The traceroute program is used to measure the end-to-end delay.

• They are often used to diagnose speed issues in computer networking.

Now go on, experiment with the traceroute program yourself !