MySpacea place for friends

IP Address - a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP). Any participating network device — including routers, computers, time-servers, printers, Internet fax machines, and some telephones — must have its own unique address. An IP address can also be thought of as the equivalent of a street address or a phone number (compare: VoIP) for a computer or other network device on the internet. Just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a building or telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on a network.
An IP address can appear to be shared by multiple client devices either because they are part of a shared hosting web server environment or because a proxy server (e.g. an ISP or anonymizer service) acts as an intermediary agent on behalf of its customers, in which case the real originating IP addresses might be hidden from the server receiving a request. The analogy to telephone systems would be the use of predial numbers (proxy) and extensions (shared).
IP addresses are managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. IANA generally assigns super-blocks to Regional Internet Registries, who in turn allocate smaller blocks to Internet Service Providers and enterprises.

traceroute - traceroute works by increasing the "time-to-live" value of each successive batch of packets sent. The first three packets have a time-to-live (TTL) value of one (implying that they make a single hop). The next three packets have a TTL value of 2, and so on. When a packet passes through a host, normally the host decrements the TTL value by one, and forwards the packet to the next host. When a packet with a TTL of one reaches a host, the host discards the packet and sends an ICMP time exceeded (type 11) packet to the sender. The traceroute utility uses these returning packets to produce a list of hosts that the packets have traversed en route to the destination. The three timestamp values returned for each host along the path are the delay (aka latency) values typically in milliseconds (ms) for each packet in the batch. If a packet does not return within the expected timeout window, a star (asterisk) is traditionally printed. traceroute may not list the real hosts, it indicates that the first host is at one hop, the second host at two hops. IP does not guarantee that all the packets take the same route.
On modern Unix and Linux-based operating systems, the traceroute utility by default uses UDP datagrams with a destination port number starting at 33434. The traceroute utility usually has an option to specify use of ICMP echo request (type 8) instead, as used by the Windows tracert utility. There are also traceroute implementations that use TCP packets, such as tcptraceroute or Layer Four Trace. A new utility, pathping, was introduced with Windows NT, combining ping and traceroute functionality. Matt's Trace Route (MTR) is an enhanced version of icmp traceroute available for Unix and Windows systems under a GNU GPL license. All implementations of traceroute rely on ICMP (type 11) packets being sent to the originator.