Trace and Ping curtin.edu.au

Trace and Ping Task
ftp
This has proved a challange. I wanted to understand what was happening and took a long time hunting up references. Most contained alphabet soup - lots of short initials.
Initially I thought you had to average a column (or the lot) and played round with Excel. As they say, if you can't get it to work read the instructions.
I found for the "trace" command (Microsoft Support, n.d.) they

1. break the message into packets


2. set a TTL (Time to live) of 1 ms


3. send a message to the first server


4. server checks for the destination address


5. the message times out soon after it arrives so a "time exceeded" message is sent back to the start with, usually, the logical address of the server


6. a second and third reading is taken for the first server


7. the TTL is increased by 1 and a new message is sent. This enables it to arrive at the second server.Steps 4 and 6 are repeated


8. this is repeated until the destination computer is reached


9. the destination computer is forced to send a message back because the address of the port of this computer is made impossibly high so that the equivalent of a "not at this address is sent"

The interpretation of the mass of numbers in the trace at the end of this blog was then clearer.

1. the IP address of the Curtin server was 134.7.179.56


2. number of hops = 19


3. each set of three allowed you to get an average of the time taken to get to that server.


4. the average time to get to the destination was given by averaging the three numbers in the last line = 235 ms


5. an * indicated that the server reached had not responded. This is probably due to a fire wall or router not being configured to accept the ping. the reason for this was probably a firewall or server configured to not receive trace and ping commands for reasons of security (Pettigrew, 2009 on the Curtin Discussion board)


6. the time to reach the server was not necessarily the time taken to return to sender as this could have been a different path. This time was not recorded


7. A ping of the server was achieved in 5 hops. I think this is because it required only a small amount of extra information to be sent. Extra data required to check whether all the packets had arrived, their order of reassembly and the codes to check if the data had been sent accurately were not included


8. An interesting extra fact was that Microsoft and Unix use different protocols to calculate trace route and ping (tech-FAQ site, n.d.). They "differ in the way they display output, in the way they send test packets, and in the number of command line option they provide". The output differences did confuse me initially.


9. I came to understand how hackers could make use of the information provided by this resource

Traceroute using centralops.net/co/
Traceroute Trace the path from this server to another
from centralops.net [70.84.211.98]
to
don't resolve IP addresses
source code: view | download

Tracing route to curtin.edu.au [134.7.179.56]...
hop rtt rtt rtt ip address domain name
1 1 1 1 70.84.211.97 61.d3.5446.static.theplanet.com
2 0 0 0 70.87.254.1 1.fe.5746.static.theplanet.com
3 0 0 0 70.85.127.105 po51.dsr01.dllstx3.theplanet.com
4 0 0 0 70.87.253.1 et3-1.ibr03.dllstx3.theplanet.com
5 0 0 0 157.238.225.5 xe-2-4.r01.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
6 0 0 0 129.250.3.73 ae-3.r20.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
7 43 43 42 129.250.2.168 as-2.r20.lsanca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
8 51 42 75 129.250.5.254 po-1.r00.lsanca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
9 35 37 37 204.1.253.166
10 186 184 184 202.158.194.157 so-4-0-0.bb1.b.syd.aarnet.net.au
11 196 198 198 202.158.194.33 so-2-0-0.bb1.a.mel.aarnet.net.au
12 205 206 207 202.158.194.17 so-2-0-0.bb1.a.adl.aarnet.net.au
13 234 234 233 202.158.194.5 so-0-1-0.bb1.a.per.aarnet.net.au
14 233 233 234 202.158.198.178 gigabitethernet0.er1.curtin.cpe.aarnet.net.au
15 235 235 235 202.158.198.186 gw1.er1.curtin.cpe.aarnet.net.au
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * * *
19 234 236 234 134.7.179.56 systems.curtin.edu.au

Trace complete
Microsoft Data Base, (n.d.) How to Use TRACERT to Troubleshoot TCP/IP Problems in Windows. Retrieved March 18, 2009 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314868/

Tech-FAQ (n.d.) How do Unix and Windows traceroute differ? Retrieved March 18, 2009 from http://www.tech-faq.com/traceroute.shtml