Traveling Through a Network

The Ping and Traceroute commands both return network information that helps to troubleshoot internet connection issues. Regarding the Pings, which communicate with IP addresses, once obtaining the IP address of the site entered (in this case, GOOGLE), it communicates to it and returns whenever the destination site (GOOGLE) responds. Google had the shortest average response time and the shortest max time, followed by Domino's (Japan), with the second shortest average and max times, and finally, Amazon. The Traceroute differs in that it continuously communicates to routers that are further away, sending three different "hops" to each router and returning different (round-trip) times for each hop. This is until it successfully returns the destination IP address on the final line. 

It appears that, compared to when communicating with websites hosted in the US, the return round-trip times when communicating with sites in different regions are consistently longer when using both the ping and traceroute commands in the Terminal application. In fact, it seems like the further away the destination site is, the longer it takes to communicate with it.

Utilizing the ping and traceroute commands, you can troubleshoot connection problems by continuously checking how long it takes to communicate with the destination location after altering settings or equipment. If you are receiving error messages or it's taking a long time to receive communication back, changing one thing and running the command again can help determine if what was altered affected the communication. One example of why a ping request or traceroute command may return with an error message or time out is that the computer making the command is not connected to the network. This would likely result in a ping time-out response. Another example could be that the network itself is down.

Ping Command

Traceroute Command