Ping and TraceRoute

Ping and TraceRoute

My first ping and trace results were for Gmail.com. I used the IP Address and ran the command with the web domain. The first ping replied all four times with a 0% loss, between 23 milliseconds and 31 milliseconds response time. The second ping replied all four times, with the same response variation. The traceroute timed out on the second hop, but the rest went through, ending at 142.251.215.229, which was the IP Address I requested. The files hopped eleven times to get to the final location. This means the files transferred between eleven “hosts” on the way through to the IP Address and domain I requested.

    After I tried to ping and traceroute Gmail.com, I tried to ping and traceroute Canada.ca and tokyodisneyresort.jp. I could not get a ping reply from either website, and 100% of the packets were lost. My traceroute path stops after hop thirteen for the Canada.ca website, while tokyodisneyresort.jp stopped after hop nineteen.

    I live about an hour’s drive from Canada, so I don’t believe distance was an issue with the request timing out. I thought it could be that they didn’t have a domain name registered with the DNS, so I tried the IP Address, resulting in four replies with 0% packet loss. I would say that the reason was that the domain name was not registered with the DNS or several IP addresses were registered, and the request times out before sending the response.

    As for the tokyodisneyresort.jp time out, I also tried the IP address, and it returned a reply that said, “Destination net unreachable.” This leads me to believe they may have firewalls in place that are rejecting the ping request. Also, I think the firewall stopped the traceroute.

    Ping and traceroute commands can assist with troubleshooting internet connections, especially with email – which is why I chose to ping Gmail.com. If an email is not going through, it can help to have both parties run a ping to see if your router can connect with Gmail’s router. Then a traceroute can give you an idea of where the email is getting stuck.