Friday 30 May 2008

Google Treasure Hunt Question 3

I've been keeping up with the Google treasure hunt as a bit of fun rather than seriously going after any prizes. At least one other guy at work has been joining me, Nick O'Leary has taken up the challenge too. Question 3 was recently released, and while I thought it might possibly present the greatest challenge yet on first inspection, it turned out to be really rather trivial.

So question 3 is all about IP routing, and tracing a packet route around the network. I was expecting some hardness built in around working out subnet masks, but there was none of that at all, just a simple route to follow resulting in an 11 node path. The question then:

Below is a diagram of a computer network. The nodes are hosts on the network, and the lines between them are links. A packet is sent out from host G with a destination of 201.89.136.112. Which nodes does the packet pass through on its way to the destination? (include start and final node in your answer)



You are then shown a routing table and must trace your way through it from the start node to the end node recording the path taken along the way. This is a solution that is quickly manually traceable since no node should be visited twice (unless Google have given you some really badly designed network).

Having said about the simplicity of this one, I managed to get it wrong the first time around by starting at the wrong node. Reminds me of maths teachers constantly saying "Always Read the Question!". Once I screwed my head on the right way around I correctly answered GFIHDLOPABC for my network.

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