If
you're wondering about the route your message takes when sending it to
another computer or website, this technical look will show exactly how
you can trace your packets with a little program called Traceroute.
Few people will really care about the path that your packet takes when
sending a message, but if you're one of those high tech egg heads then
this article may be of great interest to you. It can become very
addictive so proceed with caution.
If you're using a Microsoft Windows based operation system, then it's
very easy to trace the route that your message has taken. Not only
that, you can see exactly how many routers it took to get your message
from point A to point B. You can do this by using a program that is on
your computer called Traceroute. That is exactly what the program does.
It traces the route a message takes to get to its final destination.
To run the program you have to go to a DOS prompt. After doing this, go
to the C:windows directory and type tracert followed by the URL of the
Internet site you're connected to at the time. It will give you a
rather technical spec sheet of every IP address it stopped at along the
way until it got to its final destination.
The first number on the spec sheet tells you how many routers it went
through to get to its final destination. Then each individual router
listed on the page is numbered from 1 down to the last one which is
actually the final destination. The next 3 numbers on each line for
each router shows how long the packet took to get to that router. The
next piece of information on each line is the actual name of the router
the information went through. Yes, routers have names. This may be
important to the users but is totally irrelevant to the router itself.
Finally, the last piece of info on each line is the actual IP address
of the router itself.
The amount of time it takes information to get from one router to
another varies depending on how much traffic there is on that route at
the time. Normally, it is no more than a couple of seconds. But
occasionally, it can be longer. That is why sometimes you will be
trying to access a web site and it seems to take forever. This can be
for a number of reasons, but usually it is because along the way one of
the routers is not working correctly and has to be bypassed. Sometimes
the actual final location itself is down or having problems and the
delay is the last router in the chain trying to connect to the network.
Traceroute is not limited to just checking the number of routers
between you and an Internet site. You can use it to check the number of
routers between you and any other computer on a network. As long as you
know the IP address of the other computer you can trace the route of
the packets between you and the other computer.
In our next instalment we're going to look at how routers handle denial of service attacks and other problems.
