How To Check Your Connection Route a useful connection troubleshooting tool

[mm22 0]

Ever wondered how the content from Xisto reaches your computer. Obviously it has to go through some physical cables somewhere in the world so that every time you request some content your request will go from your home computer all the way there and all the way back.

 

Understandably a certain amount of delay can occur in such return journey, also due to the fact that the signal has to go through several routers on its way there and the way back. Those routers belongs to different providers and their response time can vary a lot. Also the signal will not take the same route all the time, some system will take care of routing your request to the first available route or better to the fastest available route after a real-time evaluation.

 

There is a simple way in Windows XP to check the path that your request, it is the tracert which can be called from the command prompt. You can open the command prompt from Start>>Run and type cmd and press Enter.

 

The following command

 

tracert Xisto.com

will give the following output (the request was sent from a computer in Hong Kong in this case)

 

Tracing route to Xisto.com [208.87.242.120]over a maximum of 30 hops:  1	<1 ms	<1 ms	<1 ms  158.132.178.29  2	<1 ms	<1 ms	<1 ms  158.132.252.31  3	<1 ms	<1 ms	<1 ms  158.132.254.61  4	<1 ms	<1 ms	<1 ms  158.132.12.20  5	 2 ms	 1 ms	 1 ms  203.188.117.65  6	 1 ms	 1 ms	 2 ms  203.188.118.6  7	 2 ms	 2 ms	 2 ms  ge9-14.br01.hkg05.pccwbtn.net [63.218.145.197]  8   180 ms   180 ms   180 ms  te6-2.1140.ar4.LAX1.gblx.net [64.211.206.225]  9   295 ms   180 ms   180 ms  ber1-ge-4-4.losangeles.savvis.net [208.173.55.197] 10   180 ms   180 ms   180 ms  bbr02-xe-5-4.lax02.us.xeex.net [216.152.255.61] 11   180 ms   180 ms   180 ms  bbr01-gi-2-8.lax02.us.xeex.net [216.151.129.198] 12   180 ms   180 ms   180 ms  Xisto.com [208.87.242.120]

The program tries to access the same router three times (that is why you see 3 columns of ms values) and reports the milliseconds elapsed at each attempt. If the connection times out you will see a * instead of a number.

 

This simple command could be useful to troubleshoot connection problems. You can immediately spot whether the problem is within your local network, your local internet service provider or on the overseas side.

 

As a comparison a ping command

 

ping Xisto.com

will give the following output

 

Pinging Xisto.com [208.87.242.120] with 32 bytes of data:Reply from 208.87.242.120: bytes=32 time=180ms TTL=53Reply from 208.87.242.120: bytes=32 time=181ms TTL=53Reply from 208.87.242.120: bytes=32 time=180ms TTL=53Reply from 208.87.242.120: bytes=32 time=180ms TTL=53Ping statistics for 208.87.242.120:	Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:	Minimum = 180ms, Maximum = 181ms, Average = 180ms

We see the traveling time is 180ms which corresponds to any of the values returned by the tracert command. This makes me think that the those returned by the tracert command are actually parallel routes which the data will alternatively take to get to our desired destination.

[Andy93 0]

Thanks for sharing this I would like to add that this can be done just as easily on Mac OS X on Network Utilities which is found in the utilities folder on the system.