Traveling Through a Network!

 This was such a fun activity to do and learn about that actually had me really interested! Using the ping and traceroute commands gave me a better idea of what actually happens when I connect to a website. When I compared the ping results from different websites like Google, YouTube and Netflix, I noticed that the response times were different and one that timed out completely. Some websites had a faster roundtrip time, while others took longer or just timed out. The traceroute results were cool to see too. It showed that the paths each website had were not exactly the same. Some websites had more hops than others and some had less, meaning the packets had to pass through more routers/less routers before reaching the destination or timing out. It crazy to think that data can travel so far and so fast but the geographical location of a website makes sense that if it's farther away it will take longer to respond because the packets have a greater distance to travel but also the routers it has to go through, other disturbances in the network, and how good the connection could be. But if these factors were spot on then even if the geographical location of a website is farther it can have a faster response than one that's closer. After doing some research and learning, ping and traceroute can be helpful to figure out why an internet connection is not working because ping can show you if a website is able to be reached and how long it takes and traceroute shows you the different stops/ hops and where there could be a problem along the route it takes. During my tests for the websites, I did ping on Netflix and ended up in a "request timed out" on all 4 packets unlike the other websites. I learned that the likely reason this happened is because Netflix blocks or doesn't respond to ping request and that large companies could be doing this for security and network-management reasons which I thought was very interesting and cool. For traceroute, I had 7 hops and then a request timed out then one more hop at #13 then the rest timed out. I thought this was interesting and learned that maybe some of Netflix routers are responding but then stops so not all routers will always respond and can skip. Overall, this is what I learned and the possible reasons I had but there could be other reasons as to why a time out or error response could happen like a firewall or a router blocking the requests.