Best way to test latency?

zenman 

Is there any possibility of borrowing a Windows or Mac based device from someone to run a traceroute?  Something seems "off" with those tracepath results, or at least in comparison to your ping tests.  

Just for info, my traceroutes and pings are almost always comparable.

Each one on the right is basically a ping from you to that hop's location. It does three to each one so you can get an idea of the variance. In a traceroute, all three are on one line, but these have each on a separate line.

As I said, I don't exactly know what your tracepath is doing. If you can ping to any of those hop locations manually and get lower values, then there's something wrong with tracepath.

Lots of things can cause incompatibilities - packet size, MTU, what the network expects to see versus what you're generating... and when I say 'the network' I mean your local LAN (basically your Chromebook, since that's the only thing on it) versus what HugheNet's WAN expects (everything between the modem and the groundstation), versus what the groundstation's provider (Qwest) and the overall internet expects.

There are basically three different segments I'm grouping into the greater network here - which is why I keep saying knowing what's going on at each node in that chain is important. But if tracepath is broken and you have no access to a working traceroute, then it's just going to give you bad data.

MarkjFine, you said, "If you can ping to any of those hop locations manually," don't know for sure if this is what you mean, but I tried this:

My second hop was host977219357.direpc.com. I tried a ping command to that, then I tried 977219357direpc.com, and finally I tried just direpc.com. All three returned with 'name or service not known.' I also tried a tracepath command with all three of those, same result.

I guess my first problem is nobody in the conversation knows for certain how to do a traceroute with a chromebook. What I found via googling is that tracepath is how you do a traceroute on a chromebook, but I have no expertise to know if that's right, and applies to what we are using it for. 

"I guess my first problem is nobody in the conversation knows for certain how to do a traceroute with a chromebook. "

You were told how to run a tracepath on a Chromebook.  So yes, we know how to do it; but it's not our fault if the tracepath command may be buggy. That's for Google to fix. 

It may require superuser access on a Chromebook to run traceroute.

Did you try typing "su" then hitting return before running traceroute, like I said way back?

I tired typed 'su' and it returned as 'unkown command."

Because su is not a Crosh command. 

what about 'sudo traceroute'

No, not a Crosh command. Here's a list of commands for Crosh. 

EDIT: while many Linux commands work,  including sudo, it doesn't work with tracepath.  And there's no tracert or traceroute command for Crosh that I know of.  It's just tracepath (EDIT 2: poor, wonky, maligned, possibly buggy, tracepath).

What about:

1. Exiting the Crosh shell first using 'exit',

2. Switching to a bash shell using 'shell',

3. Then doing 'sudo traceroute'. -> might want to try just 'traceroute' first.