Computer Networking 2009

TP 1: Tools of the Trade

 

Objectives:

Prerequisites:

Exercises:

nslookup

1.1 Which is the IP address of the Google site (www.google.com)? Explain why you have several IP addresses.

1.2 What is the name of the server 134.214.100.6?

1.3 Find out name of the IP address 127.0.0.1. What is special about this IP address?

ifconfig

2.1 What is the IP address of your station?

2.2 What are the interfaces on your station?

ping

3.1 Are the following machines reachable from your machine: wasal.epfl.ch, www.zurich.ibm.com, www.microsoft.com,dns.univ-lyon1.fr www.hoola.hp, www.20min.ch? Check if the addresses unreachable by the command ping are reachable from the Web browser.

3.2 What is the minimal, average, and maximum round trip time for the site www.fiu.edu?

traceroute

4.1 How many routers are there between your station and www.ttbt.cn? Which ones are between your workstation and the SWITCH network?

4.2 Between which routers does a packet cross the Atlantic? Pacific? Hint: compare the round trip times from your station to the routers.

4.3 Make traceroute to the site www.trustmymail.com. Where is it situated? HINT: You can find out the location of a server by using this Visual Trace Route Tool.

4.4 The www.traceroute.org provides with a list of servers distributed around the world from which using a web interface you can perform a traceroute to any other host in the Internet. Choose the server in www.washington.edu (USA) and/or www.ipartners.pl (Poland). Make traceroute from a server towards your station and conversely. Repeat it for the two traceroute servers only, i.e., traceroute from USA to Poland and back. Try out other traceroute servers from the list at www.traceroute.org. What are the IP addresses of the servers in USA and in Poland? Are the paths travelled by a packet from one host to another and vice versa symmetrical?

ssh

Let enable ssh by uncommenting in /etc/ssh/sshd_config the line #passwordAuthentication no and by replacing no by yes. After that, restart ssh by \verb"/etc/rc.d/ssh restart".

5.1 Open a session on another station in the room. Which is the default ssh port number?
Check in the file
/etc/services. The /etc/services file contains a list of Internet services and the port numbers to be used if the relevant server is set up on the computer on which you are looking at the file. The content of this file is more or less self-explanatory.

netstat

6.1 Print TCP connections that are up and running on your system. Start an ssh connection to your neighbor station. Using netstat find the TCP connection that you just established and print out the information for that connection. Which TCP connections are now up?

tcpdump

Launch the tcpdump tool by typing tcpdump in the command line. Let ping www.google.fr and simultaneously, inspect the traffic (before capturing the traffic, let flush the arp cache with arp -d -a)

7.1 Since a lot of traffic can be received, let filter it to receive only the traffic from www.google.fr.

7.2 Let take a look on the content of the packet (the payload, i.e. the information it carries). You can use the -A mode of tcpdump. Change the length of the ping and verify that the payload length changes also.

wireshark (ethereal)

Launch the wireshark tool by typing ethereal in the command line. Clear the cache of your web browser and start capturing packets on your network interface. Then enter the following URL: www.ub.edu.bz. Once the whole page is loaded in your web browser save the wireshark traces.

8.1 From the saved trace view the HTTP traffic only. Wireshark allows you to see the encapsulation where the data from an upper layer protocol is included in a lower layer protocol. Which protocols encapsulate others?

8.2 What type of transport protocol is used by HTTP protocol?

8.3 Now view only DNS protocol messages from the saved traces. What type of transport protocol is used by DNS?

8.4 Now view only ARP protocol messages from the saved traces. Are these protocol messages related to the HTTP traffic issued by your web browser? Why?

whois

9.1 Let take a look on the owner of google.fr. Why could it be useful?

Renater / Geant

Let take a look on the Renater topology (the core of the network you are currently using): http://www.renater.fr/Metrologie/map-Renater4/ http://www.renater.fr/spip.php?rubrique153 http://www.renater.fr/spip.php?article530 http://pasillo.renater.fr/metrologie/IPv4.html http://cicg.grenet.fr/ (in menu infrastructure/amplivia) and Geant: http://www.geant2.net/server/show/nav.00d007009

10.2 What are the typical bandwidth for each type of network? The delay? What do you conclude about the traffic pattern (local, distant, etc)?

10.3 What is the GIX?

10.4 let try to ping an european university. Did you succeed to find correspondences between the path and the map?