Tracing Traceroute: What I learnt about the Internet
The Internet is a fascinating and complex system. This article investigates one part of the internet through the program known as traceroute. After this article, you will know,
- What traceroute does
- What the IP protocol does
- What an autonomous system is
- What the BGC protocol does
What is Traceroute 🔗︎
Traceroute is a simple program. To start run something like traceroute google.com in your shell.
Your output will look something like this:
❯ traceroute google.com
traceroute to google.com (142.250.70.142), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 10.5.0.1 (10.5.0.1) 3.216 ms 2.296 ms 2.283 ms
2 loop2021532200.bng.vic.aussiebb.net (202.153.220.1) 7.951 ms 7.202 ms 8.926 ms
3 10.241.5.114 (10.241.5.114) 6.562 ms 6.953 ms 5.793 ms
4 10.241.4.77 (10.241.4.77) 6.348 ms * 7.327 ms
5 142.250.165.14 (142.250.165.14) 6.821 ms 8.155 ms 7.637 ms
6 * * *
7 216.239.56.48 (216.239.56.48) 8.822 ms
mel04s01-in-f14.1e100.net (142.250.70.142) 5.807 ms
172.253.53.97 (172.253.53.97) 8.352 ms
What is happening here?
Simply, traceroute is tracing the route of a packet from your local machine to the destination. In this case, google.com.
What is IP? 🔗︎
IP stands for the Internet Protocol. There are two common versions of this protocol, v4 and v6.
You may have seen an IPv4 address before, it looks something like what we have above: 142.250.165.14. An IPv4 address consists of 4, dot-separated 8-bit integers. That means there are around ~4 Billion IPv4 addresses. There aren’t many, especially when we consider all devices on the internet.
This lack of space, and other reasons, led to IPv6. An IPv6 address looks like this: 2345:0425:2CA1:0000:0000:0567:5673:23b5. In IPv6, there are 8 groups of 4 sets of 4-bit, base 16 integers. This gives us about 340 trillion addresses. Should be enough for quite some time!