Activity One - Routing in Action!
The first activity demonstrates how information on the Internet is sent through many computers to get to it's destination. Visual Tracert (Ouimet) is an online tool for tracking the jumps that Internet packets make on their way between client and server. It plots the locations of nodes that the packet travels through on a Google map.
In this activity we are asked to map the paths made to google.com, wikipedia.org, amazon.com and flickr.com then to find a website not hosted in America or Australia.
My request took 15,640 miles to travel to Google's server, Wikipedia landed in Saint Petersburg Florida; and the exact location of the final nodes in Amazon's trace were limited in scope, but all results including Flickr were located somewhere in the United States.
It needs to be noted that the distances and hops are warped because the connection has to run through YouGetSignal.com's host, also located in the US.
Finding a website hosted outside of the America and Australia was harder than I thought. The majority of my favourite websites weren't hosted elsewhere so I tried an Internet search for 'China' and chose chinadaily.com.cn as a subject. The trace jumped from Australia to Hong Kong then to YouGetSignal.com's host in America, it bounced back to Australia skipping Hong Kong then finally made its way to Beijing, China.
Out of interest I decided to see where my website: LukeFranklin.com is exactly hosted. I knew it was somewhere in the US. No surprise there, but I didn't expect it to land in Houston, Texas and not around the locations of my previous traces.
Activity Two - Who Owns What?
For this activity we extract the registration information for several domains from Whois records using AutoWhois.
The first domain we are required to check is the Curtin University website. In the course work it states the domain as Curtin.edu. Since this returns an invalid result I guess they meant Curtin.edu.au which is owned by Curtin University of Technology. Who'd of thought!
The next two domains were flickr.com and youtube.com. Flickr is owned by and registered to Yahoo!. Likewise YouTube belongs to Google and the domain is registered to them. Yahoo and Google are fairly dominant on the web and I suspect they own many domains and continue to purchase more ready to roll out new services as they expand.
Mickey.com was the third domain I had to check, but my IP address appears to be on Network Solutions black list and I was blocked from retrieving the registrants information:
The IP address from which you have visited the Network Solutions Registrar WHOIS
database is contained within a list of IP addresses that may have failed
to abide by Network Solutions' WHOIS policy. Failure to abide by this policy can
adversely impact our systems and servers, preventing the processing of other WHOIS requests.
The final two domains to lookup are obviously misspellings of Google and Yahoo's main domains: Gooogle.com and Yaho.com. These companies want to protect their products and have registered the variations to stop just anybody from setting up shop under their brand name which could be possibly damaging.
Ouimet, K. Visual Tracert Retrieved 23/09/2009, from http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/
AutoWhois Retrieved 24/09/2009, from http://hexillion.com/asp/samples/AutoWhois.vbs.asp