Sending a ping measures the round-trip time for packets sent from your computer to a destination address, and also provides information on lost packets. Sending a ping across the Internet operates on the same principle as a ping used by sonar in submarines. A small amount of data, called the ping packet, leaves your computer then bounces back to you from the destination host. Pings are useful for troubleshooting connectivity issues. Unusually high ping response times or packet loss are indicators of network performance issues. Packet loss occurs when a packet of data fails to reach its destination. Click here for more information on packet loss.

Please note that network firewalls can cause time outs and the appearance of packet loss. If the server you are pinging gives no responses, it may be due to a server outage or an aggressive firewall that rejects ping packets.

For a more detailed explanation of how ping works, click here.

Windows Vista / Windows 7: Click on the Windows start menu and type "cmd" into the "Search programs and files" field. Hit enter on your keyboard to run the program.

Windows XP:

Step 1: Click on Start, select Run,
Step 2: Type "cmd" in the "Open:" field and click OK.

A Command Prompt window will open on your screen. At the prompt, type "ping" followed by a space and the hostname you want to ping. In the screenshot above, mail.hover.com is the hostname to be pinged. Websites can also be pinged, such as www.hover.com.

By default, four pings will be sent to the target host. The ping statistics above show that four pings were sent to mail.hover.com and four replies came back. There was no packet loss with an average response time of 21 milliseconds.

Running only four pings doesn't provide a lot of data. To run more pings, use "ping -n x hostname" where x is the number of pings to run. For example, ping -n 100 mail.hover.com will send 100 pings to mail.hover.com.

The screenshot above shows the ping statistics for 100 pings to Hover from a Windows XP Command Prompt.

Type ping /? and hit enter for a full list of options for the ping command.

Open your Macintosh HD.

Under Places, select Applications. Open the Utilities folder, then double click on Network Utility.

Select the Ping tool.

In the example above, mail.hover.com is the network address being pinged, and I've select the option to ping the address 10 times.

Sending a specific number of pings provides an overall picture of your ping response time and packet loss in the ping statistics. Sending an unlimited number of pings is more useful for keeping an eye on intermittent connection failures.

Open the Terminal from your Applications menu. In the Gnome desktop environment you should find the Terminal in System Tools.

At the command prompt, type "ping -c x hostname" where x is the number of pings to send and hostname is the address of the website or server you want to ping. In the example above, mail.hover.com will be pinged 10 times.

Alternatively, to run continuous pings, type "ping hostname" and hit enter. To stop pinging, press Ctrl-C.

The ping statistics provide a summary of the ping response times and any packet loss.
__________________________________________________________

Join us on Facebook: http://about.hover.com/facebook

__________________________________________________________

Article Shortcut: http://about.hover.com/ping

__________________________________________________________