This week’s lesson was incredibly eye-opening. Over the summer I
worked with the other technician at work to set up the internet at a new
school. We ran ethernet cable. We installed routers in the racks. And plugged
in so wireless routers in each of the classrooms. It all vaguely made sense,
but still seemed like magic at the end of day. The after reading chapter 3 of
our textbook, and after using the traceroute and ping commands to see it all in
action, it all seems a lot less mysterious.
In using the ping
commands, I found the sending and receiving packets to google.com and
google.com.au took roughly the same amount of time. This is probably due to the
size of the servers running google.com. the Japanese clothing site
Rakuten.co.jp took considerably longer. In running traceroutes, both of them
went through about the same number of routers and devices. According to one
site, the ping command can help with troubleshooting a site’s host without
having to go through the “transport layer” of the IP search. This allows you to
troubleshoot just the address and not the reliability of the network itself
(Antoniou, 2007).
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| Here is the ping command for Google.com (I used both the Mac utility and Terminal, because why not?) |
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| Here is Australia's Google server... |
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| And Japan's own Rakuten |
Further, a traceroute can allow you to troubleshoot all the
routers and devices communicating along a pathway. Because a simple website
search may send data through routers, a modem, and more routers to get to the
server destination (Vahid, 2017), the traceroute can give you a good view of
that pathway.
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| Australia's Google traceroute |
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| And Japan's Rakuten traceroute |
Another
interesting use of pinging a site is that it can help a site with new content,
such as a blog, get indexed faster by search engines. The ping gives a sort of
wave that can get a search index’s attention (Pidugu, 2016). Numerous apps and
site exist to help getting new blog posts or pages get indexed via this method.
References
Antoniou, S. (2007). How to Troubleshoot Your Connections with
Ping and Traceroute. Pluralsight.com. Retrieved from https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/it-ops/troubleshoot-ping-traceroute
Pidugu, S. (2016.). What is the use of pinging a website? -
Quora. Quora.com. Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-use-of-pinging-a-website
Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017). Computing technology for
all. Retrieved from zybooks.zyante.com/
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