Hey, well for university we have an assignment to carry out a series of tracert commands to an overseas companies name server over a few days and from that draw a map and discuss what is interesting about the results. Sorry if the questions I ask are not explained well, I don't 100% understand it all.

So for the map the example he gave us he drew arrows linking 2 ip addresses involved in a hop so that is what i am attempting to do. But the questions I have is when you get the 3 results on each hop, do the 3 columns correspond to the same journey? So for example is the 1st result from hop 14 going to be the same route as the 1st result from hop 15? Is the 1st result from hop 14 going to hop onto the first result of hop 15?

Also I was wondering if from the example I have linked could anyone tell me anything interesting they see? I am really struggling with this as it seems pretty uninteresting to me.

http://pastebin.com/RGifpkNv <- Example

For anyone that lends me their time thank you in advance!

They respond to the amount of queries sent per hop: see "--queries=" in 'man traceroute'.


- You were tasked with carrying out traces over a few days: you have posted only one.
- You were then asked to draw a map: you have shown us none.
- As part of your assignment you were asked to discuss what is interesting (or not): you have not made such an attempt.

All I can say is don't try and take shortcuts and put some effort in?

Excuse me? All I asked was a very simple question to do with a command, in which I have already checked google for, and your answer is not what I am looking for. I haven't posted the map as I am fine with what I am doing with it, I was simply giving some context to why I was asking the question. Also I haven't posted all of the readings as I was just wondering what other people might find interesting with the results I posted and see if I could take that and see what else might be interesting about the others and not, as you said yourself, take an easy ride. Posting what I have already written about the results would also mean people could tell me to change things or that i could do things better which would then not be my own work and that isn't what I want. This is only one the first half of the assignment too, the other half I am fine with and understand completely. I was not coming here looking for people to do this assignment for me. What I have asked is an extremely small part of it and a part I am genuinely very stuck on. I was simply looking for a few friendly pointers for a newbie, clearly came to the wrong forums for that.

Could it be you just don't understand the answer? Feel free to ask for clarification but leave that belligerence / righteous indignation thing at the door, OK?


That is your opinion, and on LQ you're entitled to it. That however does in no way detract from the fact that you just shove a traceroute our way, don't even bother to discuss it (in fact dismissing it as "pretty uninteresting") and then expect us to analyse things for you? Like in Real Life most discussions on LQ are basically a two way street: you show us some effort, we try to build upon that. Or put more succinctly: help us help you.

I understand your answer, you don't understand my question that is the problem. Discuss it? You never gave me a chance? You just accused me of trying to take shortcuts and told me to put some effort in. You have no idea what amount of effort I had already put in as you hadn't even asked. And i said that i felt the results were not interesting, not the task in general. And you say "analyse it for you" in a way that I was asking you to do thing for me. I in no way implied that you in fact never even asked me about it. Also once again you have said I have not shown any effort when this is not the case. You may like to try and be just a little bit more polite to people as I could never accuse or judge people within a paragraph like you have done.