As consumers, we have been spoiled by the utility companies, which, for the most part, own their own equipment and provide their own maintenance. The internet is a completely different animal, related more to the highway system than the telephone system. This article addresses the mechanisms used by the internet in as non-technical a way as possible.

Every computer on the internet has an address, not unlike a street address. Since these are numeric addresses like 206.171.14.2, they would be difficult to remember. Domain names were created to make it easier for people to get where they want to be.

When you click on a link, the first thing the browser needs to know is where you are heading. When you type in the address Net2Business.com, it first needs to look up the address. This is handled by the Domain Name System or DNS. The DNS server resides at your ISP (e.g. RoadRunner, or Earthlink, or AOL) , and communicates with other DNS servers. It is typical for your request to pass through 9-13 DNS servers to get to your destination. To avoid clogging the internet with requests, DNS servers save (cache) information for up to 12 hours. For this reason, if you switch your web site or email from one host to another, it can take up to two full days for everyone to see the change.

If the DNS server of your ISP is broken, or you can't reach it, you're dead in the water. Most ISPs will have at least two DNS servers to prevent this from happening.

Once the browser has the address, it will send a request to the nearest router (called a gateway). Since it would be unwieldy for every router to know where every computer on the internet is, the request is sent from that router to one that claims to know a path to where the destination computer resides. This is called a hop, and there will likely be many hops between your computer and the web site you are seeking. A hop in internet terms is the computer stop where information is handed off to the next "runner" in the relay event.

And this is the tricky bit. You can think of your ISP as a toll-road on-ramp to the highway. On the receiving end, your web host also has a paid on-ramp. In-between is a loose collection of privately owned routers, and there may be several companies involved that don't have direct relationships with each other.

You can see this in action by openning the Command Prompt on your computer (Start|Programs|MS-DOS Prompt under Windows 98 and NT, Start|Programs|Accessories under all others). Type in

tracert www.yourdomain.com

tracert is short for Trace Route, and details the travels of your request. Below is a sample trace route for Net2Business. There is some useful information in this gobbledy-gook, so stick with me.

tracert net2business.com

Tracing route to net2business.com [216.243.235.10]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

Trace complete.

On the first line, you can see that the address has been found ( [216.243.235.10] ).

If you get:
"Unable to resolve target system name"

…it means your DNS is broken, or you have no connection to the internet.

The very first entry is your own router (or the ISP's if you're on dial-up); The ms numbers are the milliseconds (thousandths of a second) it took for that router to respond. Numbers over 100 usually means a traffic jam. Numbers over a thousand mean big trouble, and you probably can't get there from here. An * (like the one on hop 14) means the router didn't respond.

We can get a pretty good idea of where the request is going by looking at the domain names of the routers. pos2-0.kscyks119-rtr1.kc.rr.com is Time Warner's Road Runner. The kscyks part is a dead give-way for Kansas City, Kansas. Our request goes bounding across the Road Runner network and connects up with pop2-kcy-P2-0.atdn.net which is AOL's network. Note the chi in bb1-chi-P6-0.atdn.net (hop 8) which is undoubtedly Chicago. The request then meanders through St. Louis on the ATT network, and finally reaches its destination on the Lighthouse network in Lenexa, KS.

Note that even though I'm physically only a couple of miles from the server, the request travelled over 1000 miles. It's not unusual to see requests pass through Florida or Dallas when headed across the street.

Problems arise from the fact that even though Road Runner is owned by AOL, and AOL has a relationship with ATT, AOL does not necessarily have a relationship with Lighthouse. So if a Road Runner customer is having problems because of router failure further down the line, Road Runner isn't a direct customer, and can only ask nicely for someone to fix the problem, if they can figure out whom to ask.

While this is little consolation if can't get your email, it's not unlike a wreck on the highway that blocks traffic. Everyone is inconvenienced, but it's just one of those things. Luckily, a bum router or bad connection affects so many people, that outages of more than a few hours are rare.

So, the next time you see slow response from a web or email server, you'll know that you request has traveled on a long and perilous journey.