Traveling through a Network: Ping and Trace Routing

 

This was an interesting little exercise for me to wade into the process of pinging and trace routing.  I was encountering some difficulty for a while until I realized perhaps my VPN was blocking some activity. I compared the ping and traceroute below and found and there is a difference with the Traceroute, but not the Ping.

With the BitDefender VPN  (Virtual Private Network) in place, I got 4 Pings to IP address 100.96.2.36 with 42-45 milliseconds, with an average of 42ms. While there were only 4 packets for pinging sent, they were all successful (0% loss). When tracerouting Google, there were a lot of timed out requests, but eventually on number 9, I received one. Then the traceroute stopped. It is curious that there were only 9 hops, and a skip shouldn’t even be considered a true hop. Overall, this result is not exciting at all. What is important is that my computer has some protection and VPNs are a good choice. Still we should choose wisely. There is an ever-expanding need for better, faster and cheaper (relatively speaking) VPN. There is also no guarantee a breach cannot happen. “With the results of our benchmarks we come to the conclusion, that none of them are currently fast enough to handle the amounts of packets in 10 or 40Gbit/s networks.” (Pudelko, 2020)



 Google.com with VPN


What is interesting is that when the VPN is temporarily removed, the results are a bit different.  There was still a 0% loss, which is good. The IP address changed to  142.250.188.196 , probably because Google has quite a few IP addresses. Pings varied between20-34 milliseconds, with an average of 25ms.  The results from the traceroute were quite different from the results with the VPN in place. While there are still only 10 hops, the hops were all populated with site visits, with one of them being a mere 1ms and averaging 20.4ms!

 

While this was a not statistically significant because I only ran one trial, I find it interesting and possibly worth looking into on a larger scale. I chose Bitdefender as VPN largely because it came recommend from a friend and very affordable. What I see though is a clear slowdown in data packets when crossing this particular VPN on this particular day at this particular time. For Pings, the increase in time required (when using a VPN) to fetch a signal from the Ping target is 68% higher and the time to receive the traceroute is 380% longer.

 


Google.com without VPN

While the security of a VPN is necessary to help protect the computer user, the slowdown is dramatic. Now that I understand this, I may start looking for a VPN with less latency.

With regard to pinging other websites, I chose Eagle News (eaglenews.ph) and the official website of the Ukraine (ukraine.ua ).  Both of these sites are in daylight time zones compared to my night time zone.



Eaglenews.ph is a news agency site for the Philppines. There was 0% loss of packet and an average of 35ms Ping and average of 28.4 ms traceroute, putting it on par with Google.


Interesting result from the Ukraine web site. I didn’t know what might happen since the country is actively in a war with Russia. There was a huge loss of packet (25%) with an average time of 32 ms. 11 hops completed, with no hops blank. The timing for the traceroute with the Ukraine site was a little higher than Google or Eaglenews at  26.8ms.

From all this, I can draw the conclusion (based simply on a few observations mind you) that:

1.       VPNs slow down packet transfers considerably, but are used for security

2.       There are is not much difference between different country’s sites ability to Ping and trace route.

3.       The Ukraine’s web infrastructure, while clearly damaged from war, is still maintaining a competitive transfer of information.

 

References:

Pudelko, M., Emmerich, P., Gallenmuller, S., Carle, G. 2020 IFIP Networking Conference (Networking) Networking Conference (Networking), 2020 IFIP. :325-333 Jun, 2020

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.







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