Ping is an application found on all computers, which runs on the command line and allows you to communicate with any device on the network. It is the most effective method for network administrators to find out if a computer is online within a network, and it is also a useful command to immediately know if a website is online or offline .
Pinging a network address (which can be an IP address or a website address) therefore means making a call to him by sending him a message and waiting for his reply.
In addition to checking whether a computer or site is online or not, the ping command can also be used to check the speed of the network connection (or rather the communication latencies) between the system and the target website or computer.
Technically speaking, Ping is sending an ICMP packet to the recipient and then waiting to receive another ICMP packet in response.
ICMP stands for Internet Control Message Protocol and is the protocol used in networks to transmit control information, messages and malfunctions between the various components of a computer network.
In practice, you can send Ping to a computer using the Window s DOS command prompt or any other shell (for example Terminal on MAC or Bash on Linux) by simply writing:
ping IP address
or
ping website address
For example, you can Ping the router to see if the computer is connected correctly on the network by writing:
ping 192.164.1.1
If this is the default gateway address.
Instead you can do this command to check if the computer is connected to the internet or to find out if this site is online or offline.
ping www.navigaweb.net
What the result of the Ping command means
The response to the Ping displays various information describing the connection: the number of packets sent and received, their size in bytes, the total time elapsed between sending each packet and receiving the response, the average of times and the percentage of answers obtained .
A standard ping sent from a Windows system will send a 32 byte message to the target system or website, sending this message in four parts.
On Linux, Ping is sent instead as a constant and continuous message.
To send a constant and continuous ping on Windows, you must use the following command:
ping -t address
Each reply represents a message that is received by the recipient.
The answer you get from Ping is made up of some basic information:
- Duration shows how long it takes to send a message to the target and get a response.
Having a low ping means a very fast response time, which is a great thing when connecting to a game server, for example.
- TTL means Time to live and represents the number of networks crossed by the message to reach the recipient.
The number indicated, however, is not a count of steps, but "the number of network passes that the packet can make before it is destroyed" (Cit from Wikipedia)
Again in the response to Ping, Ping Statistics are obtained which tell us how many packets have been sent, how many have been received and how many have been lost.
Usually if a network address answers and is online, the packets transmitted are always all received, while if it is an offline address, the packets are all lost.
In case some packets were received and others lost it means that the connection has problems.
The approximate round trip time in milliseconds is also written in the statistics.
In general, there must be little difference between the minimum, maximum and average, otherwise it means that the connection between you and the website or computer is not stable.
Ping requests blocked
Some websites block ping requests, so if you try to ping the address of these intenret sites, the reply message will be something like " Network destination unreachable " and there is no way to ping them.
To see if a site is reachable there are still other ways.
The same thing can happen to a computer on the network that has an active firewall that blocks ping for security reasons.
In all other cases, when a Ping request fails, it means that the website address or IP address to which the request is sent is incorrect or that one of the two is offline the computer sending the ping or the recipient who should receive it.
Ping is one of the most useful tools when you need to solve network connection problems and also to check the stability and quality of an ADSL connection.
In another article we have seen how it is possible, under some conditions, to reduce the Ping time, to have less network latency and a faster connection, by changing some parameters of the computer.
