PC vs Web Based Ping and Traceroute

Traceroute
Further to the previous post on traceroute, the same trace to curtin.edu.au was done from my computer. This time it took only 13 hops (including 4 time out errors).

This result did not surprise me at all as I am in Australia and so is the curtin server (based on the .au at the end of there site address). This means the route did not need to go to other countries and the destination is physically closer. I realise physically closer does not always mean less hops, as it will depend of the routers available, however to me it makes sense that it would mean less hops in the majority of instances.

I was also not surprised to see the earlier part of the route was totally different. I was not surprised as the point of origin for the traceroute was quite different. On the other hand the last four hops were the same, also predictable as the route would have to eventually become the same as part of getting to the same final destination. I did however expect a few more hops near the end to be the same... Oh well, a bit of unpredictability makes it more interesting!

Ping

After doing a ping from http://centralops.net/co/ to see if the curtin.edu.au site was available I got the following results:

I then did a ping from my own computer using the DOS prompt and got the following results:

The ping from DOS prompt send one less packet of data. For both methods all packets were successfully sent and the IP address was exactly the same.

The differences were in the times. From the website the min, max and average times were all slower and from my own computer. This slower time was between 8 and 10 ms for each one.

When looking at this result in conjunction with the earlier traceroute results they make sense. As shown above the path from my computer has less hops than the one from the website, so it makes sense that this path is also slightly quicker.