From the course: CompTIA Network+ (N10-009) Cert Prep

Handy tools

From the course: CompTIA Network+ (N10-009) Cert Prep

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Handy tools

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- In this episode, I want to cover some handy tools that I don't cover in other episodes, but we're kind of going to need them from this point going forward. Now it's just a couple, but they're actually pretty cool. So let's just take a moment. First of all, I want to talk about Trace Route. Now, Trace Route is a command that allows you to check all the hops, every router that you go through from your system to any other system that you want. Now, we can either use the term traceroute where we actually spell it all the way out. That's usually what we do in the Linux world, whereas in the Windows world, we tend to just say tracert like that. So let's put both of those up on the screen. So it's traceroute or tracert. Now I'm going to be working in Windows, so we're going to do tracert. It would work exactly the same in Linux using the full blown traceroute. So here we go. You guys ready? What I'm going to do is I'm going to type in trace route, and now I'm going to pick some arbitrary place far away. I can pick an IP address, I can pick a web server, I can pick anything. In this case, I'm going to pick my own web server, and then I'm going to try to type it in correctly. There we go. Okay, now watch what's happening here. Each one of these is a hop. Each one of these is a packet going through a router. Now, okay, so it's done. Now what I want you to do, and here's the important thing, is look at the very top. You see where it says router.Totalhome? That is my gateway router here. What tools like Trace Route do for us better than anything else is, look, if there's some router way up in the internet, there's nothing we're going to be able to do about that. But where Trace Route really becomes very, very handy is that can we test to make sure that our routers are okay? For example, let's take a look at this one more time. We can see that this is my in-house router, and then this is actually my Xfinity. We use Xfinity here at Total Seminars. If it went to my router but didn't make it to the next box, I might want to take a look at my router and look on the WAN side. Is it unplugged or something like that. Get the idea of how trace route works? The secret to making Trace Route work more than anything else is run it when everything's running great. Get to know. I've been in organizations, I've worked with the United States at the federal level, and I've been in offices where they've got four or five routers just to get to their internet service provider. And it's a real help when you can be able to type something like Trace Route, and oh, it goes through the first three, but it's that last router before it goes out the building. And that's an internal problem, and you can use to test for that. Trace route is a great tool. Unfortunately, there are some routers that don't respond well to Trace Route. In that case, there's an alternative tool to trace route called Path Ping. So here I go, now I'm going to run it. Now you'll notice that it's really quick. That's one of the things I like about Path Ping. Path Ping uses a variant of the ping command to go ahead and generate this information for us. So just basically pings all the routers all the way up. So because it uses a different protocol, it can often get through when Trace Route doesn't work. Now if you take a look on this one, look very closely, you'll see that the first box in here, door number zero, is my computer itself. So that's often a really handy way if you're going through a bunch of internal routers to be able to know exactly where you're starting. But once you take that one out, compare path ping to trace route, and you'll see that they're very, very similar. And they should be because if you want to go from one place to the next, you tend to jump through the exact same routers. Okay, so trace route and path ping. Remember, the important thing with those tools is run them first when everything's running great, and then when something goes wrong, you can run 'em and often get good information. Okay, so moving on to a completely, now for something completely different, there is a, on the objectives now is something called bandwidth speedtester. And that is a very handy tool. A bandwidth speedtester simply does this. You're paying X amount of money for a internet speed. At my house, I have Native gigabit ethernet, so I'm paying for one gigabit down and one gigabit up. But for a lot of people who are running say cable modems or fiber optics, you have asymmetrical speeds, a much greater speed for down and a much lower speed for uploading. And that's okay. But are you getting what you paid for? And there's lots of tools out there. These are all web-based tools. Here's one that I like quite a bit. This is one that comes from Xfinity. So I'm getting around. This is hitting about 150 megabits per second, which is coincidentally pretty good. You're never going to hit the exact speed. So if you're paying for 100 megabit download, and you try one of these testers, and you're getting 70, 80, you're doing great. You have all kinds of latency issues. You might have a lousy router, all kinds of other things that come into play. So if you're ever trying to get all your speed, that's not going to happen. So if we take a look here, we'll see that my upload speed is 21 megabits per second. I know that I'm paying for 25, so I'm pretty happy with this. Where these speed testers really come into play is number one, are you being ripped off by your ISP? And it's always unintentional, but it happens. And number two, this is where cruddy home routers murder us. I can't tell you how many times I have seen bad cheap routers. Somebody got a little $60 Soho router, and it's just not designed to handle a lot of work. So, and this happens in small offices and in homes more than any place else, where all of a sudden you got three or four people wanting to download 4K YouTube videos, and you think you've got enough bandwidth, but your poor router can't handle it. And this is a great example of where people sometimes need to consider, maybe you need to get a better router. Okay, so these are just a few of the handy tools that aren't covered in other episodes in this series. Want to make sure these are covered? These are very, very important tools, and make sure you're comfortable how we use them, where to use them, and when to use 'em.

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