[Mohit Daksh]

I am new to this thing and just trying to gather some knowledge.. I was doing some route tracing and trying to interpret things.. I have a few doubts...

If data packets don't necessarily take the same route every time then how does tracing a route help in understanding the problem with a network?

Also I traced route to a website at two different times and both of the times it showed a different destination address.. How can the address of the website change..

If I discover the problem after seeing the report of trace route is there anything that I can do to troubleshoot it or is it entirely upto the ISP?


I am sorry if I am asking stupid questions

[Advertisements]

1) Route tracing is seeing which servers a request goes through to get to its destination. It helps to see where the bottleneck is and whether the problem is on the provider end, the destination site's end or somewhere in between. The provider is only responsible for the network up to where their servers send data out to other computers on the net. Kind of like a field, the farmer's only responsible for that field and if a cow drops dead on the other side of the fence, it's sad but it's not his problem.

2) Website IP addresses do change on occasion. Most sites translate back to two or three different numbers and spread the load during busy periods.

3) Depends entirely what the problem is and where the "network timed out" messages are occurring.

[Neil Jones]

1) Route tracing is seeing which servers a request goes through to get to its destination. It helps to see where the bottleneck is and whether the problem is on the provider end, the destination site's end or somewhere in between. The provider is only responsible for the network up to where their servers send data out to other computers on the net. Kind of like a field, the farmer's only responsible for that field and if a cow drops dead on the other side of the fence, it's sad but it's not his problem.

2) Website IP addresses do change on occasion. Most sites translate back to two or three different numbers and spread the load during busy periods.

3) Depends entirely what the problem is and where the "network timed out" messages are occurring.

[Mohit Daksh]

thanks a lot!!