home & schedule | class blog | syllabus | contact | grades

Use a traceroute tool and explain the difference between IP addresses and URLs

Remember our convention.

commandsargumentvalue

Task 01.06: Use a Traceroute tool

using either a client, a server, or an online tool

Using a traceroute tool, trace the route the packets take from your computer (whether you start with your client or with a server) to any domain name you are interested in.

Please run a traceroute on its domain name (in this case, you will need to include the full www.name.top_level_domain), then copy and paste a screenshot of your results into a file. We are interested in how many hops it takes to get from your location to this site. If the trace can tell exactly where this site is, I will see it in your screenshot. If the trace times out prior to reaching the site, I will see how many hops it took prior to timing out.

If you don't have any domain names you are interested in, here are a few you can use.

• www.citroen.com
• www.citroen.fr
• www.ndr.de
• www.radioparadise.com
• radiobilingue.org

Use your ALT+PrtSc tool to capture a screenshot of the data you want, then save the captured image into a file of some sort. It could be a .docx file, a .rtf file, a .pptx file; it just needs to be a file that can hold the image. If you can save the image as a .jpg, .png, or any other image format, that would suffice as well. It just needs to be able to be downloaded.

After you have saved the file on your client, FTP it into your password-protected directory, from where it can be retrieved.

Send the instructor an email telling me the filename where one can find this information.

We may as well begin here to use a consistent file naming convention. Use this file naming convention as a standard for all documents you turn in as an email attachment or as a file we can download from your web space. It will remain constant throughout the course.

The structure takes advantage of how operating systems want to index things.

LastName.FirstName(s).YYYYMMDD.TaskNN.descriptor.file extension

An example might be

johnson.pat.20180830.task01.06.traceroute.pdf

Send me the file name.

Whether or not the traceroute times out prior to arriving at this site, I would like you to do answer one question as well.

What is the IP address that the trace went to?
And what does this tell you about the relationship between an IP address and a URL?

You can add this to your email note.

Can you describe the difference between the IP address and the URL? Why does the trace go to an IP address and not to a URL?

You are to do the traceroute, but you can also see a web based traceroute tool do the same thing.

networks | inter-networks | paths | IP v. URL addressing | next session