What is Ping good for ?

Ping is used to test your network connection.

How does it work ?

A ping program will send packets from your computer to a destination computer. Each packet that ping sends asks the destination computer to respond by sending a packet back. By running ping you can get useful information about whether your computer is able to communicate with the destination computer, and if so, how well and how quickly.

Where do I get Ping ?

You should run the ping program that comes with your tcp/ip software. For windows 3.1 users who have the trumpet winsock the ping program is called trumping.exe and is in the trumpet distribution package. For windows for workgroups and windows 95 users the program is called ping.exe and should be found in your windows directory. You might check out CyberKit which is postcardware. Administrators of Linux and Unix systems will decide whether to make ping accessible to regular users of these systems. Ask your Linux admin if ping is available to you. Mac users should grab OTTool from Neon, which is freeware. It is a suite of tools which includes ping. Ping is also included with Mac OS X . Users of other tcp/ip packages should read their documentation to find out if ping is included. If your software did not come with a ping program you might try using ws_ping which is available at windows shareware sites.

How do I use Ping ?

Read the instructions that come with your ping program. In general, you tell ping what destination machine to ping. Ping will tell you whether your packets got a response and how long it took to get the response. The format of the results are different from one machine to another, but usually you will get either a number (indicating round trip time) or something like an asterisk (indicating no response).

Many ping programs will automatically send some number of packets, like 1 or 3 or 5. Some ping programs will let you tell them how many packets to send; 5 is a good number to use. For each packet sent you should get a response; so, ideally, 5 packets sent gets you 5 responses.

If you have just set up your tcp/ip software it may be useful to ping localhost. Localhost is just a word that means 'my own computer'. If you do not get a numeric response from a ping to localhost you probably have an error in your tcp/ip configuration.

If you suspect that your network connection is not working, it may be useful to ping one of your provider's machines. Prado customers can ping pns.prado.com or www.prado.com. If you get no numeric response to either of these pings then something about your dial-up connection is not right. Try pinging www.prado.com by address instead of by name. Enter its address (209.66.80.132) just the way you would enter a name. If you get a response to the address ping, but not to the name ping, then probably your nameserver information is incorrect.

If you are having trouble getting information from some specific computer out on the net, you might want to ping that machine. If you can ping your provider's machine and get a good response, but you don't get a good response to the ping to the far away machine, then you can feel pretty sure that the problem is not with your software or your connection, but is out on the net somewhere. There is really nothing you can do about this, but it is reassuring to know that it is not your problem.

Sometimes if you use ping and ask it to send, say, 5 packets, you will get back something like 3 numeric responses and 2 asterisks. This would indicate that some packets are able to reach the destination machine and some responses are able to get back to you, but other packets are getting lost along the way. Lost packets usually indicate that some part of the network out there is very busy. Connections to that machine might work, but they would run more slowly than usual.

If you send 5 packets, and none of them get back to you, then something is probably dead between you and your destination machine. Try to reach the machine later, the problem may have been corrected.