Trace Route

The Initial Task and Results
After reading all about traceroute I used the http://centralops.net/co/ site to do a traceroute from there to the curtin.edu.au site. I decided to do this three times to see how much the results varied.... only to find they were exactly the same all three times!

Trace route results:



From the above a few things can be seen. First the IP hostname for Curtin university is 134.7.179.56 and it took a total of 16 hops to get to the destination. The reason for saying 16 hops is numbers 16-18 are time out errors and therefore not actual router hops.

The fact that the route stayed the same all three times is quite interesting and raised a few questions:

• Seeing as the routers should be sending the packets through the fastest path, is the fastest path fairly stable?
• Does the fastest path change, but slowly across the day?
• Would the path be the same (both length and routers involved) if I ran the same trace in an hour? Twelve hours? A day?
• Are other sites just as stable?

Testing out some of the questions
I kill some time waiting for an hour to pass by trying a different site to check its stability. After three traces to http://www.blogger.com/ I find that overall the route was very similar however steps 11 and twelve changed slightly...

First time:
hop rtt rtt rtt ip address
11 55 55 55 66.249.94.90
12 55 67 56 72.14.236.138

Second Time:
hop rtt rtt rtt ip address
11 55 55 55 66.249.94.90
12 55 55 68 72.14.236.142

Third Time:
hop rtt rtt rtt ip address
11 55 55 55 66.249.94.92
12 55 56 56 72.14.236.138


... after waiting an hour I run the first trace again and get the following results:


When I compare these to the first results some of the timings change, but the IP addresses still appear to be the same.

Conlusions
I realise this doesn't answer all the questions I posed and that my testing is nowhere near thorough enough to make my conclusions totally solid, but this is what I have concluded:
If there were no 'busy' patches on the net, the fastest path would stay the same.

• The 'busy' patches stay fairly stable, resulting in multiple traces having the same or similar results.
• 'Busy' patches usually only affect part of the path, so that is why only part of the path changes.
• These fluctuations in how busy the routers are occur continuously, though only by small amounts