Web Technologies

Packet switching

In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data that is transmitted over a digital network into packets. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by application software. You can check your nodes along the way with either $ tracepath or $ traceroute6:

Tracepath

Read TTL: Time to live. Tells a package how many hops it is allowed to make.

If the hops are exceeded, the package gets sent back with details about the time it took and the IP of the last node it reached. Tracepath sends packages with increasing TTL, starting from 1 and collects the data that has been sent back.