COL334: Computer Networks (CSE, IITD, Semester-I-2020-21) Assignment-1

By: Pratik Pranav - 2018CS10368

1. (a) At your home, run traceroute via your Ethernet and WiFi networks for [Link], and note
the IP addresses seen on the path. If your ISP seems to be blocking packets on the path to the
[Link] network then try with different destinations like [Link] or [Link]
or [Link] or [Link], etc.

Solution: IP addresses obtained on path to [Link]:

• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]

(b) Report any curious things you notice, like some paths that default to IPv6 and how you can force
traceroute to use IPv4, any private IP address spaces you notice like [Link] to [Link], or
[Link] to [Link], or [Link] to [Link], missing routers along the path that
do not seem to reply to the traceroute requests, etc.

Solution: Curious things I have noticed while doing this assignment:

1. DNS looks out which address is there for the IP if it has both IPv4 and IPv6, it by default
uses IPv4, For example take [Link], if we just write traceroute [Link], the
path uses IPv4 by default, but we can force it to use IPv6 by using traceroute6/traceroute -6
in place of traceroute.
2. There are some sites like [Link] which defaults to IPv6 which means that
there is not any IPv4 path exists for them. If it exists it would follow IPv4 by default.
3. We could also see that traceroute for [Link] contains various private IPs on the way.

(c) Ping allows you to specify the size of packets to send. What is the maximum size of ping packets
that you are able to send?

Solution: Its different for different sites. I think for [Link] its 1452 while for
[Link] 1453 also works.

2. Consider the following web servers of educational institutions in different continents:

o University of Utah (US mid-west): [Link]
o University of Cape Town (South Africa): [Link]
o IIT Delhi (India): [Link]
And consider the following web servers of large content providers:

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COL334: Computer Networks (CSE, IITD, Semester-I-2020-21) Assignment-1

o Google: [Link]
o Facebook: [Link]
The end of this document contains a list of several working traceroute servers around the world, which
allow you to issue a traceroute command from there to any other hosts on the Internet.
Pick some 2 traceroute servers from different continents, and one being your own device, and do a tracer-
oute from there to these five web servers.
Consult whois services to figure out when traffic gets into the local ISP, transits to other intermediate
ISPs, and finally into the destination domains. One such service is [Link]

(a) In a neat tabular format, report the number of hops from the (3) traceroute sources to the above (5)
destinations. Are the number of hops between nodes in the same continent lower than the number
of hops between nodes in different continents? Do Google and Facebook differ from the others in
the number of hops required to reach them? Why would this be so?

Solution:
Country List
Country University of University of IIT Delhi Google Facebook
Name Utah Cape Town
My Machine 15 14 12 17 15
Germany 29 14(d) 11(d) 7 9
Greek 25 17(d) 15(d) 9 8
(d) means packets were dropped midway
• Above table shows the number of hops of traceroutes from different countries to different servers.
• Yes, number of hops in same continent is lower than number of hops in different continent.
Consider the example of [Link], Number of hops from USA traceroute server is 20
while from European countries like Germany and Greece its 29 and 25 respectively.
• Facebook and Google both needs lesser number of hops as compared to other web-server like
[Link] or [Link] because of larger number of web server situated around the
world. Google have around 2.5 million web-severs while facebook have 30,000.

(b) Also report the latencies between the traceroute sources and the web-servers. Does the latency
seem to be related to the number of hops, being higher when there are more hops? Why is this the
case?
Solution: There is sharp difference in RTT in Europe to [Link] to RTT to
[Link] in India. In Europe RTT ranges in 0.1ms while in India it ranges in 100ms.
I think congestion in networks as the primary reason behind the stark difference in latency between
Europe and India.
Yeah, It seems with more number of hops results in more latency. In India, Number of Hops re-
quired to access [Link] appears to be around 13 to 20 in India while in Europe, it ranges
around 5-10.I thinks hops occur mostly due to congestion and congestion is the most important
factor in realising latency.

(c) Which of the destination web-servers are resolved to the same IP address irrespective of from where
you do a traceroute to them? Why do you think some web-servers are resolved to different IP
addresses when queried from different parts of the world? You can also use nslookup to change the
DNS server that you want to use.

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COL334: Computer Networks (CSE, IITD, Semester-I-2020-21) Assignment-1

Solution: Destination web-servers with only one server always results in same IP while doing
traceroute form any part of the world. For ex: [Link] whether we traceroute it from US or
Europe or India =, its IP remains same.
While bigger companies like google,facebook receives much more web-traffic as compared to edu-
cational sites mentioned above, hence have a large number of web-servers and hence different IP
address.

(d) If you do traceroutes from the same starting point to different IP addresses you found for the same
web-server, do the paths appear different? Which ones are longer?
Solution: Yes, path appeared different for different IP address of the same web-server. Even for
the same IP address of the same web-server paths are different depending on the IP address.

(e) Try tracerouting to Google and Facebook from different countries of traceroute servers around the
world. Are you able to find any countries that do not seem to have their local ISPs directly peered
with Google and Facebook?
Solution: I checked on website called [Link]/traceroute and then further checked
the final ip address reached at [Link]/ip − lookup where you could traceroute for an
ip address from 10 simultaneous places.
After running the same for [Link] and [Link]. I found that Google and
Facebook hasn’t set up a web server in the Netherlands and Japan.

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