I.P Addresses and Tracing Them

For us telephony and communications geeks out there, I really think this is my favorite tools and abilities of routing. Of course I'm still pretty new to networking, and this is a pretty simple and probably well known feature. But lets say you take any website, to avoid angering anyone, lets use this very site. (Blogger is hosted by google, so I suppose it will anger google lol.) But you ever wonder where these sites are hosted from? I mean seriously of all the millions and millions of websites it really is interesting to see where they come from. And also, the path that your computer or router takes to get to them. Well for those who don't know, you can. Click your start button, or the window icon for you vista and 7 users. Click the run function. A little dialog box will innocently appear and you type in CMD. The MSDos command prompt will appear. You type in this as follows:
tracert www.loopinginfinities.blogspot.com
Make sure you put the single space after the tracert command. You can do this for just about any website. Press enter and a series of names and numbers will begin to be listed. This is my favorite feature of the command. It actually shows you the path that the information is sent from. When I run this command to this very site, it's first step is my router, then some sort of origin gateway, then it says Newark Core RT2, meaning the big city near me is called Newark, so it probably passes through a routing station there. After a few more of these it hits New York, then some sort of Google server, and then finally down into the routers there and finally to a single machine. (or more accurately a router for the single machine) Anyway I love seeing the pathway that all this information takes from my humble computer out onto the massive servers and routers and switches of the internet at large... Anyway, now that you have the websites final I.P address (the last number in the list), you can go to a site like: http://www.ip-adress.com/what_is_my_ip/ , and put the numbers into the small text box at the top. From there it will show you the location of there that I.P address is being served at. Generally though, these numbers are probably router numbers and not the true address of the computer its on.. Routers have that built in fire wall that lets them protect the computer that they're in front of. Anyway, hope you enjoy this stuff as much as I do.
For fun put in to the command screen: tracert 127.0.0.1 and see what comes up. A loop! 127.0.0.1 is the way of saying I want to talk to my own router. So the router sends a signal to itself. One of my favorite ways to cause a piece of machinery to self reference. Until next time!