Ping and Traceroute: What to do with them?

I have a Chromebook so the path to perform a ping and traceroute was slightly different than Windows or Mac, so I had to research on the internet how to do it on a Chromebook. I discovered that I had to use Ctrl+Shift+T in order to open my terminal and then I had to type either ping or tracepath depending on which command I wanted to run. This was my first time ever learning about Ping and traceroute and based on my research, they are both network diagnostic tools. Ping is used to test connectivity between two hosts, while traceroute shows the intermediate hops between the source and the destination (Grimmick, 2023). Based on my results after performing ping on different websites, I was able to see 100% packet transmission and receipt for google.com and registry.africa, but I had 100% packet loss for canada.ca. Packet loss can be caused by several things, such as network congestion, network hardware problems, and software bugs or threats, just to name a few. Since two of my websites had 100% transmission and receipt, I was able to compare the results. For Google, the packets had an average of about 37 ms of transmission, while the Africa domain website had an average of 543.29 ms of transmission. I would expect this since google.com is based here in the United States while registry.africa is based in Africa.  

Performing a traceroute was a bit more complicated to me. My traceroute results for each of my websites all ended with a line that said “too many hops”. Hops are the number of routers that data travels through and each time the data goes from one device to another it is called a hop (Grimmick, 2023). Based on my results, google,com had the fewest hops before I received the “too many hops” result while registry.africa had the most hops. The time of the hops was greater for the registry.africa website than for the other two websites I used, which, once again, is what I would expect since the African domain is farther than the other two.  

Both pings and traceroutes can be used to troubleshoot connection problems by diagnosing connectivity issues between networks. Ping is typically used to troubleshoot a connection to a specific website, while traceroute is used to determine where a connection is failing between a device and destination host. As mentioned earlier, just like in ping, network congestion and network hardware problems can cause a time out or an error message to be returned.  

I used https://support.ask4.com/help-support/performing-diagnostics/connectivity-issues-wired-chrome-os/#gsc.tab=0Links to an external site. to help me understand how to ping and traceroute on Chromebook.