Module 1 Tasks – Internet tools - traceroute

Bunnies or brewing? How many hops?

Traceroute

I visited the site How stuff works for a lesson on traceroute. It describes traceroute as “it traces the route that a packet of information takes to get from your computer to another computer connected to the Internet”. Straightforward.

Then off to centralops.net/co/ ( I hadn't seen this type of protocol eg /co/ before) to use the traceroute tool.
Here are the hops:

(I copied and pasted these into a word doc without issue - BUT attempting to paste them directly into my blog as requested has resulted in much frustration and a very long post so my friends, you will have to be satisfied with a screenshot).

There were 19 hops to the Curtin server which was number 20 in sequence and the average time in milliseconds was 123 (one way).

The IP NUMBER of the hostname curtin.edu.au is 134.7.179.53

Because the process of accessing the internet is usually ‘transparent’ to users and so fast, it came as a surprise to me that so many hops were required. Users take so much for granted - a ‘slow’ internet connection is a source of frustration but they really have no idea why. This exercise demonstrates to me the concept (#25) of identity and location in that the ‘fixed’ and ‘known’ points that packets of data are carried through to reach the end user can be identified (and now, right there for you to see on screen ; )