What’s the first thing you do when your Internet connection is not working ? I changed my reasoning from thinking that it was related to my computer to one that assumed the Internet Service Provider was responsible for the outage. Well that’s not 100% true but I know several signs that tell me if it is my fault or the fault of my ISP.
I usually restart my router to be on the safe side but that’s it. Sometimes you can make a connection to the Internet but that connection feels slow, you get disconnections and websites that are not loading properly.
One way to find out if the problem is located on your side is to perform a tracert command to the target server. If that tracert times out you pretty much know the IP address of the server responsible for that along with information about the country the server is in.
This is also the basic approach of Hubble, a service that monitors Internet reachability in real-time. Instead of using one tracert at a time they send out more than 100k every 15 minutes to monitor reachability problems throughout the world using a Google Maps mashup to provide a map of so called black holes, meaning servers that are unresponsive or have a reduced reachability.
The interesting information for the users are the IP addresses or ranges of those servers and the country column of the table. Sorting the column by country reveals problematic server at a glance which can help determining if the problem is located at your end.
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6 Responses to “Monitoring Internet Reachability in Real-Time”
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typo: whats the first thing..you missed thing
This is a great website, but I think the easiest thing still remains the trace route command. Coupled with ping and ipconfig /all you can pretty much get the gist of any problem you’re having with your internet connectivity.
I usually do the ping test. I ping my IP and the IP of my ISP to see which one’s not working.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
Hmmm…
My grandmother used to say “Don’t play with your ping or you’ll go blind.”
Sorry…slow Saturday so I have to amuse myself.