Question

the first few hops are the same for various websites?

3. . Then briefly describe what is the reason of having the same hops for different destinations.
4. Need help understanding why using Tracer T certain websites have the some of the same route steps but different destinations. Thank you

Answer 1

c) The reason for same hops but different destinations is that, some ISP, does load balancing in the autonomous system, so same destination across different ways. On different runs of traceroute to a destination, we can certainly see different paths to that destination. multiple routers replying to the same probe TTL packet. This usually is the case when the routers belong to the same ISP. So, as a result same hops for different destinations may arise.

d) Tracert is a Windows based command-line tool that can be used to trace the path that an Internet Protocol (IP) packet takes to its destination from a source. Tracert will determine the path taken to a destination. It does this by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo Request messages to the destination. When sending traffic to the destination, it will incrementally increase the Time to Live (TTL) field values to aid in finding the path taken to that destination address. The path is outlined from this process. The path displayed is the list of routers in the path between a source host and a destination. One thing that is very important is that near-side interfaces are used when reporting. The near-side interface is the interface of the router that is closest to the sending host in the path. The way tracert works is, once launched and utilized, tracert will report (print out) a list in the order in which it heard back from each host that it passed on its way to its intended destination.

On Windows-based systems, we can use tracert program to test the path to a server. To do this -

• Open a DOS command window.
• At the command prompt, type the following command -

tracert websitename.extension.

• Now we need to interpret the output from tracert. The tracert displays each hop, indicated by a number in the left column. It also displays the domain and IP address at each hop, as well as the time spent.

Using tracert command to check certain websites can give the paths where some of the hops are same route steps but different destinations because some internal hops may be common for different final destination.