Trace Route

Did you ever wonder how you could click on a button and be accessing information from a web site in Connecticut or Australia or just next door? Our computers use a system of delivery similar to the post office or any delivery system.

Every computer connected to the Internet has a unique address called an IP address - just like our street address. Our routers have addresses too … similar to the Post Office. To make it easy on us, our IP address is translated to a more user-friendly name: we type www.google.com and it is translated to 216.239.35.101. But, if you wanted to you could type in the numeric address instead.

While our packages travel over roadways and airways, our data travels via wire or cable. Our packages travel through major distribution centers in large cities, our data through their own distribution devices, one of which is called a router. Our computer devices act as traffic cops moving data along from one location to another.

Let's compare our data to a letter in a postal truck traveling down the road:

•Our letter is the data
•The road is the wire or cable
•The intersections are routers
• Our houses are the computers

If our truck driver wants to know how he goes from point a to b, he would probably get directions via turns at intersections. We can ask our web server which way it goes through the routers that determine our path.

Logic would tell us that we should travel the shortest distance, but this is not so. There are often the equivalent of road closures and traffic jams. In these instances of interference, we could travel half way around the world and not even know it.

If you would like to trace the path your data takes, you can use a DOS command called traceroute. Traceroute tracks down the path that our data takes and records all the "hops" or turns through the routers along the way.

For instance, I went to my own web site: www.wiseowlops.com and found that I traveled from Nipomo to Colorado, New York, New Jersey then Virginia where I finally reached my server, which is in Florida.
You can find a friendly and visual example of the trace route tool at http://visualroute.visualware.com.

Simply enter the Host name (the web address) at the prompt and below will appear the route you taken to a web site. You will be able to see the time (it's in milliseconds) that it took for each hop to get to your website.

Of course, curiosity is one reason to track a route. But there are others. When things are slow, we often wonder if it is everywhere, or just the site we are visiting. Trace route will tell you if it is a traffic jam. Although it won't help speed you up, it may encourage you to log off and try again later.