Becoming an Internet Infrastructure Detective
I’ve never been to Australia, but it sure seems like a great place to visit. I have some friends who live in Sydney, and they spend a lot of time enjoying cultural events, especially the top-notch music performances. They go to a lot of concerts at the Sydney Opera House, that iconic building that defines the city (much like the Golden Gate Bridge defines the San Francisco skyline). Built in 1973, this venue is regarded as one of the 20th century’s most distinctive and famous buildings.
Why am I telling you this? It’s simple, really – but maybe a little peculiar. I decided to look at the web site for the opera house (www.sydneyoperahouse.com) and it got me thinking about how my computer here in San Mateo could be connected to a computer in Sydney. I’m interested in behind-the-scenes things of all kinds, and I started to wonder about things all of us now take for granted. After all, we live in a “connected world,” and we never have to think about the details that are involved in making all of that work.
Until now!
I want to know how my computer physically connected to Sydney. I know there is some type of communications carrier, but I’m not certain what that is. Copper wire on the ocean floor? A satellite in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles over the equator (yes, that’s where they are)? A fiber optic cable on the ocean floor?
The transmission speeds are fast, so my guess is the fiber optic cable, but I wanted to see if I could find out for sure. Using Google search, I found this map of the Southern Cross Network (https://www.southerncrosscables.com) – a fiber optic cable system at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean – and it seems to be the most likely way we’re connected to Sydney. (Note: I didn’t verify this, it’s just an educated guess. Let’s see if I’m right.)
That does raise a few more questions. If my computer is using the Southern Cross Network, what’s the actual network connection in North America? I know that I’m using a Local Area Network in Building 19 at College of San Mateo, which is somehow connected to the Internet. Somewhere in “cyberspace,” further connections must lead to the Southern Cross Network and on to Australia, right? I’m assuming that’s the way my data would get to Australia, but using TCP/IP, it could always find a different route. That’s what routers do.
Here is another assumption. In Sydney, the Opera House (and everyone else in that part of Australia) must be connected to the other end of the Southern Cross Network, right? The above map looks like there’s a “northern” route, too, which I guess is a way to have some redundancy.
A slight tangent I recall reading about an incident some years ago where a ship’s anchor ripped apart the only fiber optic cable on the ocean floor in the Persian Gulf, and it wiped out more than 70% of the Internet traffic to India and the Middle East. I’ll bet there are at least two cables in that area now. It never hurts to have a backup.
Back to my office. I have some choices of how to connect my computer to the network. Option 1: WiFi. Option 2: wired with the Ethernet cable that’s sticking out of the wall next to my desk.
Actually, option 1 even has options. There are two WiFi networks in the building (and around most of the College of San Mateo campus), an unsecured one for students, and a secured one for faculty and staff.
Since a wired connection is much faster than wireless, I usually plug the Ethernet cable straight into my laptop. That looks something like this:
The Ethernet cable goes from my office across the hall to a router in the back room of the Computer and Information Science department’s computer lab (Room 124 if you’re ever in the building). That’s where the WiFi wireless router is also located, and I’m fairly sure that it’s the same router the Ethernet cable is plugged into.
Another tangent I know that my home router works as both a wired and wireless device, so I bet that’s true for the one I use in Building 19. My home router looks like this. The antenna is for WiFi, and the yellow plugs are for Ethernet (wired) connections. At my house, we don’t use the Ethernet connections any longer; every device we now have (computer, printer, iPad, Kindle, phones, PlayStation – wow, that’s a lot of stuff) connects via WiFi. That’s most likely for your home connection, too. Am I right?
Back to Building 19 and my next question: Where does that router lead to? I asked one of the campus I.T. staff, and he have me a vague answer (“Somewhere in Building 1.”), but later admitted that he wasn’t really sure. I have always assumed that there are underground cables on campus – they are faster and more reliable than WiFi radio waves, so it would make sense to use them to eventually take me to the Internet. It’s a certainty that there are routers all over the place. For the time being, I’m going to accept the notion that everything leads to Building 1.
I’ve asked our district I.T. staff about some of these network infrastructure questions in the past and found out that the CSM campus computers and telephone lines are connected to the San Mateo County Community College District office data center, which is located at 3401 CSM Drive, just adjacent to the CSM campus. A fiber optic cable links the two locations. Fiber carries data much faster than copper, so it’s the logical choice in this situation. Since the County of San Mateo owns all of the land between the CSM campus and the district office, it’s perfectly fine to dig a hole in the ground and put the cable there. Here’s a small map to see the connection area.
The college district has a very extensive data center with lots of servers, routers, communications lines, and an air conditioning unit that’s about the size of 4 household refrigerators. That data center is where the college district’s web servers are housed, including the computers that have the collegeofsanmateo.edu and smccd.edu domains and data storage (including the WebSmart registration system, and your grades and transcripts). Those computers are connected via high- speed lines to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). When I started to write this description, I wasn’t sure what or where that computer is located but my snooping around came up with the answer. Continue reading and you’ll find out, too.
I assume that there is a similar set-up in Sydney, and all over the rest of the planet for that matter. After all, the “Internet” is really a “network of networks,” so it all makes sense to me.
The rest of this document describes how the laptop computer in my office is connected to that web site in Sydney (and a few more things along the way). A funny thought just came to mind. How do I know that computer is actually in located in Australia? You know, I really don’t know that. As I said above, all of our computers (and IoT) are connected via the Internet, so the Sydney Opera House web server could be anywhere the Worldwide Web leads. Interesting.
The discussion from here on gets a bit esoteric, so please bear with me.
If I want to know how I’m connected to the Internet, it would help to know two things: who my ISP is and what my IP address is. I found out this information by using two simple Google searches. Here are the exact search phrases I used:
“What is my IP address?” and “Who is my ISP?”
You can try the same thing out for your computer. It’s good to know that information.
If you are curious like I am, you’ll want to know more. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a list of search tools that I still use to find out similar information. Here are some of the ways I learned to be an “Internet Infrastructure Detective.” I hope you will try some of these, too.
The type of service I have found useful Web site address Google searches www.google.com Wikipedia online encyclopedia www.wikipedia.org What is my IP address? whatismyipaddress.com Who is my ISP? https://www.whoismyisp.org Information on registered domain holder www.whois.net Information on registered domain holder using http://whois.icann.org the ICANN “whois” service. Information and analysis of a web site www.showsite.org Where is the geolocation of an IP address? www.iplocation.net Reverse DNS lookup http://viewdns.info/reverseip Find My IP Address, My ISP, Proxy IP, Host and http://www.spyber.com User Agent
What is my IP address?
When I searched Google it told me my IPv6 address. I have also found whatismyaddress.com useful, because it shows additional information including geolocation. I usually end up using this URL:
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup
Here is the information about my office connection:
My IP address is: My ISP is:
I’m still curious about the sydneyoperahouse.com site, and asked myself these questions:
What is IP address for Sydney Opera House’s server? What ISP do they use? Is their host computer really in Sydney?
To get the answers, I started with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). One of their services is called “who is.” It tells you what you want to know about any registered domain name. Here is the URL I used for my search:
whois.icann.org
Try this yourself for a web site that interests you. You’ll get tons of information, including the name, address, and phone number of the registrant of the domain name. You’ll also see where the domain name is registered. In my example, the sydneyoperahouse.com domain name is registered by GoDaddy.com. I know about them, because I use GoDaddy for my personal web site and the site for one of the music groups I manage. GoDaddy currently charges $11.99 per year to register a domain name.
However, ICANN just keeps track of domain names; they don’t know anything about ISPs or IP addresses. You’ll need to turn to another service for that. I frequently use www.showsite.org. Here’s the URL I used for my current search:
www.Showsite.org/www/sydneyoperahouse.com
I found out that the IP address for the server is 203.32.178.10. The geolocation feature didn’t work for this search, so I used another service: www.iplocation.com. Sure enough, that IP address is for hardware located in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. I even know the longitude and latitude. You might recall that there are several geolocation methods. IP address lookup is one way, and the other common ones are using a GPS satellite or using a specific WiFi
hotspot. The latter two are not available to me when I use IP address lookup, so I’m satisfied with the information I now have. Here’s a map:
Notice that last item: “Organiztion.” What is Telstra Internet? I did a Google search and got the following information:
Description: Telstra Internet is “Australia’s largest and fastest national mobile broadband network.” That sounds like an ISP to me. We’ll run into them again below. Web site: https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband
This might seem like a tangent, but I sometimes use another service called a “reverse IP address” lookup. I did a Google search and got the following definition:
“Reverse DNS (rDNS) is a method of resolving an IP address into a domain name, just as the domain name system (DNS) resolves domain names into associated IP addresses. One of the applications of reverse DNS is as a spam filter.”
There were several sites listed that do rDNS. I chose the first one, www.viewdns.info, and looked up 203.32.178.10. I found out that there are 3 domains hosted on that server. They are:
sydneyoperahouse.com sydneyoperahouse.com.au sydneyoperahouse.net
It’s a common practice for organizations to register more than one domain name. This allows for localization (as seen with the “au” suffix in the second domain name above), and as a way to deal with typing mistakes that people sometime make when they look for a web site.
I have wandered a bit off track here. I still need to find out about my office computer. Remember from above that I’m connected to smccd.edu. I used www.showsite.org and got all kinds of details about the college district’s domain name, including the IP address: 207.62.235.151. Here is the URL I used to get to that search going in the first place:
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/207.62.235.151
I got some good information, including:
Host name: smcweb-new.smccd.edu ISP: California State University, Office of the Chancel
I think the last part of the ISP got abbreviated and really should be “Office of the Chancellor.” The search said that the server is in Belmont. I wondered if I could find the street address, so I tried this Google search:
“isp California State University, Office of the Chancel”
I clicked the first link that was displayed:
https://tools.tracemyip.org/search--isp/california+state+university%2C+office+of+the+chancel
This returned a list of 50 IP addresses – all over the state! Too much information!
I went back and looked at the 3rd entry on the Google search results and got another IP address: 134.154.44.221. I looked that up, using the following URL:
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/134.154.44.221
Here’s what I learned:
ISP: California State University, Office of the Chancel City: Hayward
I started to think I was wandering off track again. I tried a lot of other searches but couldn’t find out exactly how I’m connected to the other networks around the world (“The Internet”). I had to find another way. Here’s what I did.
I went to two places off campus and used the “tracert” utility program to trace the exact route from those locations to 134.154.44.221. The “tracert” program exists in all of the major operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix. I’m using a Windows computer, so I went to the “command prompt” and typed:
tracert 134.154.44.221
This is getting beyond the scope of this class, and I don’t expect you to do this, but it’s the best way to find the path to the IP address you are interested in. Sometimes, network technical support personnel do this (or teach you how to do it over the phone) to diagnose connection problems.
My first attempt was from a location in South San Francisco. Here’s what was displayed:
Tracing route to 134.154.44.221 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 7 ms 5 ms 8 ms 1 2 20 ms 18 ms 15 ms 9 3 19 ms 15 ms 33 ms be-10005-sur03.dalycity.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.85.190.181] 4 26 ms 27 ms 31 ms be-217-ar01.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net [69.139.199.193] 5 31 ms 16 ms 17 ms be-33651-cr02.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.90.93] 6 22 ms 27 ms 20 ms be-11083-pe02.529bryant.ca.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.84.14] 7 36 ms 40 ms 17 ms 66.208.233.122 8 24 ms 23 ms 19 ms 64.57.21.5 9 19 ms 17 ms 15 ms dc-eb-csu--svl-agg4-cmf.cenic.net [137.164.41.226] 10 * * * Request timed out. 11 * * * Request timed out.
This shows how TCP/IP tried to find its way from South San Francisco to the California State University, Office of the Chancellor in Hayward (134.154.44.221) – basically an “end around” search to see how the Internet is connected to smccd.edu. Remember, TCP/IP can always use different routes (the very intent of packet-based communications in a distributed network), so what you’re looking at is what happened at the moment I typed the tracert command.
The display is very informative. The left-hand column shows the jumps from one router to the next towards the destination IP address (these are called “hops”). The next 2 columns contain timing information, expressed in milliseconds (ms), showing the latency between a request and response between routers. The numbers above are low, which indicates good throughput. If you ever experience unusual delays while using the Internet, you might be able to see why (and where) using tracert. Somewhere along the line, one or more of the timing values could be unusually high, which would indicate a problem with a specific router/server setup.
Towards the right, you will see the host names of the computers in the path you are taking. Sometimes these names are informative, but sometimes they are misleading or non-existent. The above display contains all three of these, as I will explain in a moment.
The very right-hand side shows the IP addresses of the routers you visit on your journey. This is great information to have. It shows how one network connects to another – the very definition of “The Internet.”
I highlighted a few items to better help me explain things to you. For my personal privacy, I redacted the first two routers. Take it on my word that this search was done in South San Francisco with Comcast as the ISP.
Hops 3, 4, and 5 show the search progressing through the Comcast Wide Area Network along the Peninsula and South Bay: Daly City, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale (highlighted in yellow). Hop 6 is where things get strange. The host name 529bryant.ca.ibone.comcast.net is totally misleading. I didn’t know what “bryant.ca.ibone.comcast.net” is, so I did an iplocation.net lookup on the IP address 68.86.84.14 and found out that it’s a Comcast site in Marietta, Georgia! It jumps from there to a Comcast site in Troy, Michigan (66.208.233.122). I wonder what’s happening.
We need to look at hop 8 very carefully. The IP address 64.57.21.5 is run by virginmedia.com in Ann Arbor Michigan. We’re not using Comcast routers at this point. We have jumped to another network. At last we have reached “The Internet” – a network of networks. Cool!
Hop 9 takes us back to California, specifically to 137.164.41.226. This is yet another network, cenic.net. I looked that up and found – to my delight – that it is registered to “California State University, Office of the Chancel” in Cypress. I must be getting close. Here’s the map:
The trail goes cold as soon as I hit hop 10. That’s when the router starts to get unusually long delays from the next router in the path. For obvious security reasons, web site owners put firewalls up to prevent hackers from getting into their sites – which is essentially what I’m trying to do right now. Oops, no malice intended. Honest. It appears that I’ve hit a firewall anyway (attempted hop 10 above), so I can’t make it all the way to the destination IP address.
However, the host name at hop 9 includes the cenic.net name. I did a Google search on Cenic and found this out:
CENIC is a non-profit organization located in La Mirada (home office) and Berkeley (smaller office). CENCI operates the California Research and Education Network (CalREN), “a high-capacity network designed to meet the unique requirements of over 20 million users, including the vast majority of K-20 students together with educators, researchers and other vital public-serving institutions. CENIC’s Charter Associates are part of the world’s largest education system; they include the California K-12 system, California Community Colleges, the California State University system, California’s Public Libraries, the University of California system, Stanford, Caltech, and USC. CENIC also provides connectivity to leading-edge institutions and industry research organizations around the world, serving the public as a catalyst for a vibrant California.”
Eureka! This must be the connection from smccd.edu to the rest of the world.
While I was in South San Francisco, I tried to see if I could reach the Sydney Opera House (203.32.178.10). Here’s what happened:
Tracing route to 203.32.178.10 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 4 ms 4 ms 5 ms 1 2 31 ms 18 ms 12 ms 9 3 24 ms 16 ms 16 ms be-10005-sur03.dalycity.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.85.190.181] 4 19 ms 16 ms 23 ms be-217-ar01.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net [69.139.199.193] 5 16 ms 15 ms 16 ms be-33651-cr02.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.90.93] 6 23 ms 29 ms 14 ms be-11083-pe02.529bryant.ca.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.84.14] 7 25 ms 19 ms 24 ms i-0-0-0-14-peer.paix02.pr.telstraglobal.net [134.159.63.157] 8 19 ms 26 ms 21 ms i-0-4-0-58.paix-core02.bi.telstraglobal.net [202.84.247.42] 9 181 ms 202 ms 202 ms unknown.telstraglobal.net [202.84.247.46] 10 201 ms 214 ms 395 ms bundle-ether3.oxf-gw11.sydney.telstra.net [203.50.13.97] 11 540 ms 598 ms 194 ms bundle-ether1.chw-core10.sydney.telstra.net [203.50.6.92] 12 319 ms 187 ms 205 ms tengigabitethernet7-1.chw52.sydney.telstra.net [203.50.20.154] 13 316 ms 204 ms 171 ms sydney231.lnk.telstra.net [120.151.131.94] 14 * * * Request timed out. 15 * * * Request timed out.
The first two hops are redacted to protect my personal privacy. The trace continues on to Comcast locations in Daly City, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale. Hop 6 takes us to Marietta, Georgia, just like the previous trace did.
Hop 7 takes up to another network – telstragobal.net. Remember them from above? They are the ISP for the Sydney Opera House. The telstraglobal.net site (134.159.63.157) is in Concord, North Carolina, and the routers keep taking us towards our destination. It’s not clear how we jump to another continent (e.g, undersea fiber optic cables), but we finally reach the city of Sydney at hop 10 – sydney.telstra.net. Things jump around Sydney a few more times, and we finally hit a firewall at hop 14. That’s OK with me, as I think we know the path from the opera house to the last IP address – we made a “full circle” if you will. Thinking back, I never did find out if my actual path took me along the fiber optic cable of the Southern Cross Network. Like I said at the outset, it’s nothing more than an educated guess.
I’m very inquisitive, so I thought I’d repeat things from another physical location. I came down the Peninsula a bit and repeated the above searches from Foster City. This time, I was connected to AT&T as the ISP. I did a tracert to the “California State University, Office of the Chancel” (134.154.44.221) and here’s what happened:
Tracing route to 134.154.44.221 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 2 ms 52 ms 4 ms d 2 45 ms 68 ms 30 ms 76-220-52-1.lightspeed.sntcca.sbcglobal.net [76.220.52.1] 3 25 ms 21 ms 32 ms 71.148.180.53 4 21 ms 28 ms 27 ms 71.145.0.240 5 25 ms 23 ms 22 ms 12.83.39.137 6 25 ms 22 ms 29 ms gar23.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.114.5] 7 * * * Request timed out. 8 * * * Request timed out.
For my personal privacy, I redacted the first hop. I checked the IP addresses for hops 2 (San Mateo), 3 and 4 (71.145.0.240) – the latter two are located in Richardson, Texas – and I noticed that they are all registered to AT&T Internet Services. Up until hop 5, we‘re still in AT&T’s Wide Area Network (WAN). Hop 5 is where we join “The Internet.” IP address 12.83.39.137 is another network, AT&T Worldnet Services in Morristown, New Jersey. We jump from there
back to San Francisco (12.83.39.137). The Internet is a sure strange place! We hit a firewall at hop 7, so I didn’t trace my all the way to smccd.edu via this route. I’ll save that for another day.
As long as I was in Foster City, I figured that I would see the route it would take to reach the Sydney Opera House (203.32.178.10).
Tracing route to 203.32.178.10 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 2 ms <1 ms <1 ms d 2 85 ms 21 ms 40 ms 76-220-52-1.lightspeed.sntcca.sbcglobal.net [76.220.52.1] 3 20 ms 22 ms 24 ms 71.148.180.53 4 27 ms 20 ms 20 ms 71.145.0.240 5 25 ms 38 ms 25 ms 12.83.39.145 6 34 ms 46 ms 43 ms 12.122.114.53 7 33 ms 30 ms 63 ms 192.205.32.86 8 90 ms 103 ms 89 ms nyc2-brdr-01.inet.qwest.net [205.171.134.50] 9 94 ms 117 ms 102 ms i-0-0-2-3-105-peer.ny8a02.pr.telstraglobal.net [134.159.48.21] 10 94 ms 90 ms 91 ms i-0-0-2-0.ny8a-core01.bi.telstraglobal.net [202.84.252.145] 11 97 ms 101 ms 90 ms i-0-1-0-5.eqnx-core01.bi.telstraglobal.net [202.84.136.94] 12 371 ms 358 ms 302 ms i-43.sydo-core04.bx.telstraglobal.net [202.84.136.34] 13 254 ms 250 ms 249 ms bundle-ether3.oxf-gw10.sydney.telstra.net [203.50.13.93] 14 246 ms 254 ms 258 ms bundle-ether2.oxf-gw11.sydney.telstra.net [203.50.6.95] 15 253 ms 248 ms 246 ms bundle-ether1.chw-core10.sydney.telstra.net [203.50.6.92] 16 248 ms 277 ms 244 ms tengigabitethernet7-1.chw52.sydney.telstra.net [203.50.20.154] 17 251 ms 245 ms 246 ms sydney231.lnk.telstra.net [120.151.131.94] 18 * * * Request timed out. 19 * * * Request timed out.
I left out hop 1 for the same reason as above. Hop 2 puts me in San Mateo at sbcglobal.net, part of AT&T Internet Services, a predominant ISP in this area (Comcast being the other). Hop 3 keeps us in the Bay Area. Hops 4 through 10 look like this:
Hop 4 71.145.0.240 is AT&T Internet Services in Richardson, Texas. Hop 5 12.83.39.145 takes us to the AT&T Worldnet Services network in Morristown, New Jersey. Hop 6 192.205.32.86 is AT&T Services in San Francisco (yet another network with “AT&T” in the name). Hop 7 205.171.134.50 takes us to Qwest Communications Company in Monroe, Louisiana. (Trivia: Qwest was started by Southern Pacific Communications Company, an offshoot of the railroad. They now carry “virtual passengers.”) Hop 8 134.159.48.21 jumps to Telstra Global Internet Services Network/24 Block in Gloucester, Massachusetts. That name is familiar. Hop 9 202.84.252.145 jumps to Telstra Global Internet Services Network Blocks in Sydney. We’re getting close. Hops 10 through 17 jump all around the Telstra WAN in Sydney (I don’t know why there are so many jumps here. Sometimes this can be caused by heavy network activity in a geographic area – the Internet version of a traffic jam.)
We hit a firewall at hop 18, so we almost made it to the destination IP address. This is good enough for me. I’m almost done showing you my Internet Infrastructure Detective skills.
Here’s the final search of this discussion. For my online class, I store all of the class files on a system called Canvas. Canvas is run by Instructure, Inc. (the web address is instructure.com), a software company located in Salt Lake City, Utah. I decided to find out about their web server. I wanted to see if it is really in Utah, what kind of web server software they’re using, and other such items.
First, I looked up their IP address using this URL:
www.showsite.org/www/instructure.com
Their IP address is 54.191.191.127, and they are using Apache web server (the leading, open source web server software in the world).
I used whatismyipaddress.com to get geolocation information. Hey, look at that! The server is in Boardman, Oregon, not Salt Lake City. I wondered why.
I did a Google search on “Boardman, Oregon” and found out that it’s not a big city. The population was 3,220 as of 2010 census. (Hey, it’s the census again. Shades of a previous reading.)
A Wikipedia search provided this information (I did some snooping to try to independently verify some of this, by the way):
A huge data center linked to Amazon.com is there on a 9,000 acre site. The data center is powered by a dedicated 10-megawatt electrical substation. That’s a lot! The article refers to an unnamed web site that says “the Boardman site was created in response to the rapid growth of Amazon Web Services.” Further, as early as 2008, “Amazon had announced that Amazon S3 was storing 29 billion objects.” (There is a citation for this in Wikipedia.) The Wikipedia article states that many other web companies, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Rackspace have large data centers in the same area (these are called “server farms”).
I went to www.showsite.org and found all kinds of information about instructure.com. Most notably, I confirmed that they are indeed hosted by Amazon Web Services. Do you remember AWS from Project 4? Amazon Web Services hosts many of the top companies and organizations in the world, including Netflix, General Electric, Kellogg’s, Adobe, BMW, NASA, Spotify, Pinterest, etc. Amazon claims that there are more than 1,000,000 companies on Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services has now reached a $14 billion annual run rate; the company posted $12.2 billion in sales for 2016 (up 47% from the previous year) and more than $3 billion in profit. (Full disclosure: I’m one of their users. I own a domain name and small web site that is hosted on Amazon Web Services. I paid $11 to register the name for a year and I get free storage on the Amazon “cloud.” The big users pay big bucks to use the AWS.)
As a double check, I did an iplocation.com search on instructure.com (54.191.191.127) and confirmed that the server is in Boardman. Finally, I went to ICANN and found out all kinds of business and technical information about Instructure, Inc. I won’t bore you with the details.
Wrapping it up I know this has been a very long discussion, but there is a reason for all of it. One of the stated objectives of this class can be found in one of the “Student Learning Outcomes” I told you about at the beginning of the semester. Here is the exact wording of a skill you are supposed to have by the end of the class:
“Demonstrate ability to use and evaluate Internet tools for research.”
So, think about this for a moment and decide if you know how to demonstrate your research skills. Think if you could find following items using the same research tools I did:
What is your IP address? What is your ISP? Where is your ISP located? How does your ISP connect to other networks on the Internet? How are you connected to the Sydney Opera House? (This assumes that you know how to use the tracert utility program.) What research tools would you use?
This is not a homework assignment, but I thought you should know about these things anyway.