Ping: An Easy Way to Test IP Connection

Sometimes, you try to connect to a website that doesn’t allow you to access it or it shows that this website is unresponsive. This is mostly because of your internet connection or some privacy measures taken by the respective website. This can be checked by performing a ping test on your system.

Ping is where you are asking another computer to respond on to you. So, let’s say when we’re trying to test whether we have an internet connection or not, we could ping Google or let’s say we’re trying to connect to a server on our network. So, what actually is ping? Let’s take a look.

What is ping?

A ping is a command line network utility that can be used to test a whether a certain computer can be reached through a network or not. The ping command sends a request over the network to a specific device. A successful ping results in a response from the computer that was pinged back to the originating computer.

Let’s take a simple example to know more about ping. Let’s assume we’ve setup a new computer and we can’t get onto the internet even if the pages download. We might still have the very slow connection. A ping could be great way to test whether we are able to communicate with other computers.

How does ping work?

The ping utility uses the echo request and echo reply messages within the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), an integral part of any IP network. When a ping command is issued an echo request packet is sent to the address specified. When the remote host receives the echo request, it responds with an echo reply packet. By default, the ping command sends several echo requests, typically four or five. And the result of each echo request is displayed.

How to run ping?

Ping can be performed in all the platforms and OS.

The above picture is of Windows Command Prompt and the results of ping test.

1. In Windows,

• Go to the search bar and type ’cmd’ (Command Prompt) or ‘MS-DOS’.
• Type ping followed by a respective IP address.
• Press Enter.

2. In Linux,

• Open a shell prompt.
• Type ping followed by a respective IP address.
• Press Enter.

3. In Mac,

• Open a new terminal window.
• Type ping followed by a respective IP address.
• Press return.

Understanding the results

Starting from the left side

Reply from: This message confirms that the respective ping address has received your request from your system. Microsoft Windows by default send four requests to the respective address.

Bytes: It outputs the size of the ping request. That is, by default 32 bytes in size.

Time: It tells you about the time in milliseconds between the transaction of sending the request by the sender and acknowledging the request by the receiver.

Time to Live (TTL): Each packet in network is sent with some TTL value. It tells that how many different networks this packet can cross. If the TTL value is zero, it means your packet has been discarded.

Ping an unresponsive IP address

The above image displays the results for an unresponsive IP address.

There are some reasons why ping failure occurs. Let’s take a look at the reasons for ping failure.

• If the entered IP address is invalid. There will be a message displaying ‘Destination Host Unreachable’.
• If the sender or the host system is not connected to a network.
• Or if the receiving system is not connected to a network.
• If there is an error in the transaction.
• Or if the address pinged is using some IP address privacy measures.

Ping a Website by its name

In the above given image, it shows the result for pinging of Systweak network (www.systweak.com). So, the time here is 264 ms. As we can see, the IP address that replied to our request is Systweak IP address.

As a network security measure, some of the websites block ping requests. These measures make the receiving server unresponsive and unreachable. Websites that are unresponsive time out your requests making them unreachable.

I hope by reading this article, you have now understood about ping and its usage and working in network.

If you find this helpful, please let us know. You can also drop your feedback if we have missed out on anything about the article in the comment section.