Path Finder

It seems the tasks are getting a little more interesting now...

Time for some trace route.

A lot of "fun" (depends what tickles ya fancy ;) ) can be had doing a tracert to different servers and seeing what routers you get a response from.

One method is through a website such as http://network- tools.com/

A quick trace to curtin.edu.au reveals a list such as what follows:

What it reveals is a list of routers that relay requests from the site to the Curtin Uni server.

The IP addresses are those of each router on the way, and the three sets of numbers in microseconds are the average response times (ping) to and from the router. Obviously the lower the ping number the better.

What's interesting about this particular trace is that there appears to be some latency issues between hop 9 and 10. If the next set of pings were lower again, then the spike could be disregarded as a router priority issue. In such a case, a high ping is not due to latency and is not really an indication of the true ping to that router.

Also the timeouts may be due to a firewall in the way. The average ping to the Curtin server (ip: 134.7.179.56) is about 243ms.