We’re switching our network provider. Before we did, we decided to do some speed tests, to find out which was faster. We did this by pinging ireland.com. Strangely, we found that our old provider was faster, in spite of the fact they’re supposed to be a slower link, with antiquated technology.

So, we dug about a bit more. Using our old provider:

[johnke@oasis johnke]$ traceroute www.ireland.com
traceroute to www.ireland.com (195.7.33.37), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
 1  www.ireland.com (195.7.33.37)  256.913 ms  4.886 ms  9.690 ms

No wonder we it was faster. We’re on the same subnet.

Anyway, I was just amused by this. I’ve never seen a one-hop traceroute to a major site before.