HOW DATA TRAVELS THROUGH A NETWORK

Packets travel through the network in a series of getting to the destination by going through different checkpoints until it reaches its destination and then sends a receipt back saying it was received. Two of the websites that I did a traceroute for were quite similar, google.com and youtube.com. They both hopped around 25 times and started timing out around the same level and just about as many times until completion. The one website that differed from the first two was apple.com, it had significantly less hops and did not time out at all. The conclusion I made comparing the results that geographical location does directly affect the return time because if the distance is longer than the more pitstops it must go through until it gets to the destination and returns to where it originated.

I believe ping and traceroute commands can be an integral part to troubleshooting connections between all the components that the data must travel through to get to its destination. It is just like shooting signals through wires to see signal strength and if attenuation is occurring as well as if the signal is not making it past a certain pitstop on the way. You can see how long it takes for the data to get to the next destination or if it took longer than expected and timed out, which could also be a high indication of the network failing somewhere along the way. One possible reason a command will time out could be that the wherever the data is being sent to is blocking it from getting there because it’s not getting through its security set up. Another possibility that it is timing out is that that the wherever the destination might be configured in a way to ignore the data that you are commanding, and it will time out repeatedly.