Ping

[gooooogle]

Sorry. Don't really know where to post this.

How does ping work. I know that you can ping a site via the terminal by typing ping and then the website. But what does all the stuff I get back mean? What's the whole point.

 

[GordyMac]

I believe it is to test speeds.. example..

ping capertech.net

Pinging capertech.net [209.123.49.217] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.49.217: bytes=32 time=48ms TTL=46
Reply from 209.123.49.217: bytes=32 time=46ms TTL=46
Reply from 209.123.49.217: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=46
Reply from 209.123.49.217: bytes=32 time=46ms TTL=46

Ping statistics for 209.123.49.217:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 46ms, Maximum = 48ms, Average = 46ms

As far as I know.. it pings the location 4 times and replys the length of time it took to get a reply and then tells you the fastest, longest and average.

 

[GamesCreation]

It wont always work though, a lot of firewalls on sites + computers block ping requests.

 

[gooooogle]

When I start it in the Mac OS X terminal (A pure UNIX command line tool) and use ping it goes on forever. Never stops.

 

[GamesCreation]

Can it take any parameters (IE how many times to do it) ?

 

[gooooogle]

Ah yes. "ping -c 4 www.vision-park.net" gave me four pings on my web site. Very nice. Thanks for mentioning it.

 

[gooooogle]

Wow, google.com has a good ping.

 

[GamesCreation]

Of course it does, I'm willing to bet microsoft and other big sites do to. Might be interesting to do a list of pings between all the big sites and compare to factor in popularity, speed of servers, connection etc.