A software utility used for administration purpose to test if a host exists on the network. Mike muss in December 1983 invented the ping utility; the tool was used to troubleshoot problems that occur in an IP network. Through the ping utility, round trip time is calculated for the messages sent from the origin to that of the destination host.
Ping utility sends ICMP (Internet control message protocol) request packet to a specified node on a network which in return sends an ECHO_REPLY packet. This is the process which happens when you ping a machine.
· From the source, ICMP echo-request package is sent to the destination.
· A sequence identifier I set, which is incremented with each request.
· In the data section of the request sending time is interested.
· If the destination host is alive, it sends an echo reply message back.
· Calculation of the round-trip time is done when the response from the destination is received and the time is noted for that and sending time is extracted from the package.
· A sequence identifier is incremented for each request received and new echo request is sent again. The no. of the request can be set by the user or can be executed until the program is terminated.
The data received is processed and used to calculate packet loss percentage, the information then is displayed contains ping statistics for the destination which is the information of the packets sent, received and the total percentage loss and also contains the round-trip minimum, maximum and average time values. Data for each request made is also displayed with the response is obtained for each of them.
Several network diagnostic tests can be performed using the Ping command, some of the following are mentioned below:
· If a computer can be reached on the network can be found out using ping. Ping not working on a particular node and working on many nodes possibly suggest that the particular node is down. If you cannot ping any node on the network it suggests that the network is down.
· Ping command can be used to determine the time between the ICMP request packet sent and the response generated and reverted, which is used to calculate the internet distance in the terms of network. Ping distances can be a great help when talking in terms of speed, the less the internet distance the less the response time.
· Ping when performed on a particular domain name, the DNS server resolves the request for a particular IP and IP for the particular host is returned and shown.
Here we do a simple ping on domain name www.google.com and the IP of the destination is obtained, the time for each request, the total time and packets sent, received and lost throughout the process is displayed.
There are several ways for several tasks in which ping can be useful and ping utility comes with a lot of options below is the screenshot for all the options available.
Ipconfig (Internet protocol Configuration) is a console application for Microsoft Windows which shows the configuration values for the current TCP/IP network and can be used to change the values for Domain name system (DNS) and Dynamic host configuration Protocol (DHCP) settings.
As Ipconfig is a console application when ipconfig command is executed in the Microsoft Windows command prompt it generates the following output. This output contains details for the different adapter attached to the computer and their details if they are connected and active. There are five details provided for each adapter if it is connected:
· Connection-specific DNS Suffix
· Link-local IPv6 Address
· IPv4 Address
· Subnet Mask
· Default Gateway
The data gained is used to identify the number of interfaces present on the computer and in which network each interface reside.