Ping Command- A deeper dig

Ping Command

What is Ping Command ?

Most of you are aware of the ping command probably. Packet Internet Groper as it stands for finds its use to check the network connectivity. It uses the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol).

In an IP network, ping is the essential command to check the traceability of the host. It measures the round trip time of 32 bytes ICMP echo request from Source to the Destination host, and the echo reply from destination to the source.

ping
Executing Ping command from the Command Prompt

The Ping result looks like the image, as shown below. Let us take the terms one-by-one. The image illustrates the ping statistics in Windows OS. In other OS, like Linux, the statistics slightly differ. Though, the basic syntax and significance of ping command are the same in all Operating Sytems.

How to execute the command ?

The simple syntax is <ping x.x.x.x>, where x.x.x.x is the IPv4 address. The letter ‘x’ may represent numbers 0-255. To know more about the numbers in IPv4 address, you may go through another article on the IP address. You may also use domain names in place of IP addresses for pinging. For example, ping networkhope.in.

It will send the echo-request packet to the destination host. The destination host means one whose IP address includes in the Ping command. You can execute the Ping command either from the RUN dialogue box or the command prompt.

To run Ping from Run dialogue box, press Windows Logo + R from the keyboard. It will open the Run dialogue box. Now you can type Ping followed by IP address after adding a space. Hit Enter, that’s it.

Open command prompt from RUN
Opening Command prompt from the Run dialogue box

To execute it from the command prompt, type CMD in Run dialogue box, and hit Enter. The command Prompt screen opens, here one may type the ping command in the same syntax and hit the Enter button.

The advantage of running Ping from the Run dialogue box is that you can reuse that command without a need to type it again, from the drop-down in the future.

About The statistics of Ping Command

The ping command sends four ICMP echo requests by default, and the output displays the round trip time for each ICMP echo reply. As you can see here, the four ICMP echo packets took 1,3,1, and 2 ms, respectively. The statistics show the maximum, minimum, and average time in ms. The average here may look somewhat tricky, but it’s showing the times rounded to 1 milli-second, so it looks like that. In the Linux OS, it shows up to 2 decimal places in ms, which is somewhat more accurate.

The successful ping result shows the IP address of destination host, bytes, time, and TTL in each line. IP is the logical address of the destination host, and bytes signifies the size of the ICMP echo requests in bytes, which is 32 bytes by default. In the next section of this article, we will see how to manipulate the packet size. Time represents the round trip time for the packet to reach the Source host, rounded to 1 ms. TTL is Time To Live, which means the limit of hops.

The TTL value is decremented by 1 in each hope until it reaches 0. The intermediate router discards the ICMP packet when the TTL reaches the numeric value 0. Or you can say the ICMP packet will stay alive up to that number of hops. If the TTL value is 64, the data packet will not go further after reaching 64 hops.

Error Messages

If the Ping is not successful, different types of error messages are generated. The most common error messages are:

Request timed out: The destination host is not responding most probably due to network issue.

Destination Host unreachable : The destination host is shut down, not connected or not operating in the network.

TTL expired in transit: The destination host is beyond the TTL value. Suppose the destination host is 30 hops from you . If you set the TTL to any number less than 30, this error message will appear. I will explain this later in “-i” switch.

Transmit failed. General failure: Either the source device has no physical connection or has no IP address, Missing adapter, etc.

Important Switches of PING command

Switches are the additional optional parameters you can combine with a Ping command. Let us examine some essential ping switches one-by-one with their uses.
You should know when to use, and which switch to use rather than remembering all the switches. Keep in mind that the Ping switches described here are case sensitive.

The ‘-a’ switch

The ‘-a’ switch resolves the IP address to the hostname in the network. Suppose that you are managing a secure Network, and found an IP conflict in it.

There may be some reserved static IP for devices like Printer, Server, etc. You will never wish some other host use the same IP and disturb the complete Network. Now, all you want is to trace the host which is having duplicate IP.

You can trace the hostname of that device with the help of ‘-a’ switch. As you can see in the image below, pinging a host with its IP address combined with the Ping switch ‘-a’ resolves the hostname of that PC.

Syntax : ping -a x.x.x.x
Ping switch -a

The ‘-i’ switch

If you get the error message TTL expired in transit, “-i” switch can be used to define TTL value. The TTL values by default are different for different OS’s. Maximum permissible TTL value is 255.The syntax is :-

Ping -i <value> x.x.x.x

In image below, I am successfully pinging a remote host with TTL value 27 . Whereas reducing the value to 26 gives the TTL expired error . The remote host is exactly 27 hope away.

Ping TTL

The ‘-t’ switch

The ‘-t’ switch is used to continue the pinging unless it is interrupted. You can interrupt by pressing Control+C . It is useful to check link which is continuously going UP and DOWN. Remember it is added after the IP address with a space.

Syntax is : Ping x.x.x.x -t

The ‘-l’ switch

This switch defines the packet size in bytes. By default its 32 bytes in Windows. It is useful in checking the link when there is intermediate time out message. You can just increase the size of packet and check whether it works.

Syntax is : ping -l <size> x.x.x.x

The ‘n count’

By default Windows OS sends four ping packets. As we have seen, applying the ‘-t’ switch at the end of the ping command sends continuous packets unless one manually interrupts it. With the addition of the ‘n count’, you can customize the ping command to send a predetermined number of ICMP packets.

Syntax is :- ping -n <count> x.x.x.x

n count Switch

The above figure shows the ping command with the ‘-n ‘ switch limiting the ping request to a number 5. The pinging stops automatically after 5 ICMP packets.

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