Module 1 Tasks - Internet Tools

Traceroute
By coincidence I was only recently shown traceroute and ping by a colleague. On that occassion we used MS DOS prompt (called tracert), which seemed fairly simple once you knew the little tricks. This time I used Network-Tools and achieved the following results:

As you can see below, it took 17 hops from network-tools to curtin.edu.au

The average time in milliseconds (ms) was 248ms.

Interestingly the curtin.edu.au IP address was 134.7.179.10 which is different from the answer in the 'self test'. Many other students also got this result so either we are all wrong or curtin has changed the address, server or something similar.

Ping

As suggested in the text, I downloaded A-Tool bar last night and had a bit of a play with it. It has heaps of functions, many I probably will never use, but it seemed fairly user friendly.

For this task I had to ping the webct site from my pc and from net tools site. Like others I had trouble with the webct site so I just did a ping to curtin.edu.au

I have posted both results below:

network-tools Ping time Results

Ping 134.7.179.10
[curtin.edu.au]
Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 249 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 249 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 249 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 249 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 249 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 248 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 249 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 248 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 249 ms

Round trip time to 134.7.179.10: 248 ms

Average time over 10 pings: 248.7 ms

PC Ping time Results

Average time over 10 pings: 69ms

The ping from my computer was much quicker than the ping from the net site. This is probably more due to geographical reasons more than anything. Network-tools is located outside of Australia, so it has much further to travel. I expected the time to be shorter and this proved to be the case. While the Internet makes the world a smaller place, distance can still be a factor, even if it is only at a micro-second level.

Traceroute Comparison

I thought that running the traceroute from my pc would take less hops than the Network-tools website.

Below are the results.

A quick comparison shows that

Local

20 hops and 70ms average

Network-tools

17 hops and 248ms

This was a suprising result for me. I'm not entirely sure its correct but I did test both ways several times. One possible reason for more local hops could be that it takes my ISP more hops to get onto the backbone. The longer time from Network-tools could be due to its location outside of Australia.
Overall these were interesting task that challenged me learn and try to explain some unexpected results.