The Network · Workshop 07 · Mastery
Follow a Packet Across the World
Five steps. About 25 minutes. Up to 7 stars. The constellation you're building is called First Trace.
The Network · Workshop 07 · Mastery
Five steps. About 25 minutes. Up to 7 stars. The constellation you're building is called First Trace.
Every time you type a website name, a small drama plays out in milliseconds. Your computer asks 'where is this?', gets the address, makes a connection, asks for the page, and gets it back. You're going to slow that down and watch every move.
Step one: you type 'google.com'. Your computer doesn't know where google.com is, so it asks a DNS server — basically the phone book of the internet — for the IP address. The DNS server replies with something like 142.250.80.46.
Step two: your computer sends a packet to that IP. The packet hops through your home router, your ISP's routers, several backbone routers, eventually reaching Google's servers. The reply takes a similar path back. The whole round trip usually takes under a quarter of a second.
By the end of this workshop you'll have walked through one full trace and counted the hops.
That's the warm-up. When you've actually read it — not skimmed — tap below.
Pick all that fit.
Click a step, then what it does.
Ask your grown-up to run 'traceroute google.com' (Mac/Linux) or 'tracert google.com' (Windows) in a terminal. Or just walk it out on paper. Write down what you see at each hop.
Stuck? You don't actually have to run the command. Walk it out on paper: hop 1 = your home router, hop 2 = your ISP's local router, hop 3 = ISP regional, hop 4-6 = backbone, hop 7-9 = destination ISP, final hop = the server. Total: ~12-15 hops typically.
One sentence.