Traversing a Network

Ping is a great tool to test connectivity. In my workplace, we utilize a lot of printers. Printers are a great way to utilize ping to see if the printer is actually connected to the internet. We use this as a troubleshooting step to try and identify if an ethernet cable is faulty or if there is something wrong with the printer itself. Using ping we are able to identify if everything is connected properly. Once we can confirm that the printer is connected to the network then we can send print jobs to that IP and they should print out accordingly. This scenario would be used to troubleshoot within a local network, but ping can also be used to see if a particular computer is connected to the internet. As we all did we can ping a website and see if we get a response. If we are not getting a response then we are likely not connected to the internet, it is less likely that the website is down.

Here I was able to ping google.com, amazon.cn, and amazon.ca. In the time= section of the ping we can see how long it takes for the website to respond to my ping. The closer the source is to the server the shorter the time needed to get a response. When pinging the website in China it took much longer than pinging a website that is based in the United States.

Tracert is a helpful tool when trying to identify where communication gets broken. When running a Tracert you can see each "hop" that information takes on its way to its destination. If we can see that info is hoping at one IP address and then stops it tells us that something is stopping our info from hopping to that next IP. This could cause a network engineer to look into where the hop is stopping to see what could be blocking it.