Traveling Through a Network

 The original message, web page, or file starts its travel through the network by first being broken down into small chunks called packets. My first ping with Google showed that 4 packets were sent, and each packet that was sent had a sequence. The sequence number is like an address on a letter; it shows where the packet came from and where its destination is. The packets are guided by devices like routers and switches. The packets do not all take the same route even though they will end up at the same destination. The routers direct each packet towards the correct network. Once the packet has reached its destination it is reassembled in the correct order based on the sequence numbers and delivered to the recipient’s device. From my google.com ping you can see that 4 packets were sent, 4 were received and zero lost. It was the same with my other pings to google in Australia and Japan. You can also see the average time did not vary much. With google.com the average round trip time was 27ms, compared to 25ms with google Japan and 27 ms with google Australia. When tracing the route on all three the request did time out. This can be caused by many different things such as a firewall that blocks ICMP traffic, a slow connection, network congestion or prioritizing of traffic by the router and server. For troubleshooting Ping and traceroutes can be useful because they can tell if a device or server is online and responding or if a packet is lost it can suggest an unreliable connection.