What is the Ping command and why is it needed?

The world can no longer imagine life without the Internet. Millions of people sit in social networks, play online games, search for information in search engines, make purchases and pay for certain services. And if several years ago the speed and quality of the Internet did not often come up, now with a huge choice of providers these two qualities of Internet services come to the fore. Therefore, energy and forces are spent on diagnosing and debugging the work of computer networks, and this is not an easy task at all.

Often there are problems with the lack of communication between some users or even a whole group of machines. What to do then? And how to define the administrator the quality and availability of individual nodes and network segments? In many respects, the Ping command will be able to clarify the situation, which can be applied practically in any operating system. Let's try to figure out what kind of team it is, and in what cases it is used.

The Ping command determines the exact response time of the remote server to which ICMP packets are sent. Applied by its network administrators to diagnose the problem of accessibility of individual segments or nodes. But this does not mean that the ordinary user can not apply it.

The Ping command is a universal tool, available to all and at any time. In addition, the syntax of its use is so simple that even a person who does not have to deal with computer networks will like it. It includes a wide arsenal of parameters, through which you can put in front of the system more precise parameters of work. In operating systems, the Ping (Windows, Unix) command is quite simple. To do this, just run it in the appropriate application. For example, Windows users just need to run the command line and enter the following text: ping , where the triangle brackets indicate the node for which you are going to check ping. For users of Unix-systems all the above-described actions are sufficient to execute in the terminal.

The Ping command is most often used with the -t, -s, -i parameters . The first one allows to track the action of the command unlimited number of times (that is, ping does not finish its work after the time set by the standard settings). The second is to change the size of the ICMP packet that is sent to some computer or server, and the third is to change the interval between sending these packets. You can also use other parameters, which you can learn about by calling the local help for this command.

It is quite logical that a simple user may have a question: "How to interpret the results of the team's action?". Answering it, it is worth noting that ping gives a general idea of the speed of moving a packet over an existing network. If it passes between nodes at a certain interval, without frequent jumps, then this is evidence of the correctness of the work, but if the packets come with a strong delay or do not reach at all, this means that the network has some problems that need to be resolved urgently by the computer administrator System.