Talk:Ping (networking utility)

Gopher a Rodent?

The mention of Gopher (as a reference to rodent) is a little odd. Gopher was a text command that we used in the infancy of the public Web to find information at other sites (usually other universities or .edu's). It was developed at the University of Minnesota and shares the name of their sports team, but was realative to ping b/c if you were trying to contact a site or server you could ping it, and if that didn't work, you could irreverently gopher it to see if you could get a response. if neither of those worked and you were really, really bored, you could finger the server and try to talk to someone that was logged in there.

That is of course not the Gopher that is meant in the article. Gopher (protocol) -- the "text web" -- dates back to 1991 and ping to 1983, so the G in pinG could never refer to the text protocol. And a Gopher (animal) is indeed a rodent. The article is correct. You could have found out by yourself by just clicking the link. (Links are blue text that you can click with your mouse (computing). A mouse (animal) is also a rodent, but that is not what I mean.) ;-) Jaho 00:19, 22 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Non-ICMP ping

It should probably be mentioned that some sources (the Perl Net::Ping package, for one) consider that sending a UDP or TCP packet to the ECHO port (7) and receiving the same content back is also considered a ping.

Yes, you're right, but both ports TCP-7 and UDP-7 are closed on almost any computer, rendering the ECHO protocol completely useless.

Establishing a regular connection to port 80 of a web server also is a way of pinging. The elapsed time between sending the initial packet and receiving the first responding packet is the round trip time. This way of pinging is sometimes used, because some web servers (and even complete ISPs) have all ICMP filtered out.

I can think of a dozen more ways to ping (e.g. using traceroute, which sends UDP packets to incrementing port numbers starting at 33434, and prints the round trip time to the destination and each router on the path).

NTP measures round trip time for its own internal purposes, using its own protocol (on UDP-123). So, in its own way, it pings.

I don't believe the article should try to describe all possible ways of pinging.

This article describes the regular way of pinging: using the ping program, which sends ICMP echo requests. Jaho 02:38, 22 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Should there not be a generic ping page which links to icmp, tcp, and app-specific methods of measuring latency, going over the general concept and laying out the various protocols and contexts used, including social (pinging a coworker via email or IM for a response about some issue). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by John.prather (talk • contribs) 23:21, 17 April 2007 (UTC).[reply]

mdev?

"10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9008ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 21.896/24.187/25.718/1.619 ms

This output shows that www.google.com is a DNS CNAME record for www.l.google.com which then resolves to 64.233.183.103. The output then shows the results of making 10 pings to 64.233.183.103 with the results summarized at the end.

   * smallest ping time was 21.896 milliseconds
   * average ping time was 24.187 milliseconds
   * maximum ping time was 25.718 milliseconds"

The article explains that the results are summarized at the end, but doesnt explain what mdev is in min/avg/max/mdev. What is mdev? (explaining rtt is round trip time could make it a little better written).

"...183.104 with a summary of the round trip time results at the end"

mdev stands for mean deviation, a regular statistical term, not specific to ping or networking.

I've tried to clarify the article text a bit on round trip time and mean deviation. Jaho 00:06, 22 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Note that the ping in iputils (used in the example) calculates the square root of ( the means of the squares minus the square of the mean), which is standard deviation.

Move book?

I don't think the comment about the childrens book supplies any information to the wiki besides the fact that the book exists. Could we move this information to a seperate page? Hopefully then at least it might be developed beyond the stubby link. Is Ping (Literature) accepatable? MB 21:23 16 May 2003 (UTC)

When we have any info, it can be put at The Story of Ping - but we should have a link from here to there so anyone coming here in search of info about the book can be directed there. Or so I feel. Martin

High and low ping

links to here that mentioned high and low ping. I have no idea what this means and expected to find the answerI can hazard a guess, perhaps someone can include this here? Melody

A high ping = 700ms a low ping = 2 ms (ms = miliseconds). Dialup has higher pings than DSL or Cable Htaccess 09:01, 30 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So, if a server has for example a ping of 500, what does that mean? That it costed the server 500 ms to proces the ping and respond to it? - anonymous

No it means that it took 500ms for the response to reach you. Grey GosHawk 21:06, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

is it good or bad if you have high ping?

Having a low ping is generally considered better, internet applications will generally become more responsive the lower the ping so for example with a web browser pages will load faster. Htaccess 20:42, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ping is all about measuring the round trip time from your computer to a certain host, that is the elapsed time (in milliseconds) from sending out an echo request to receiving the associated echo reply.

We're talking about network latency (milliseconds) now, not about bandwidth (bits per second), so low ping times don't make web pages load faster. Jaho 19:46, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If the latency to the server hosting the page is high, it makes the page longer to appear on your screen because the resquest will take more time to arrive

Port

What's the default port used by the ping protocol? This page doesn't tell me. - Noel 09:02 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Ping is part of the ICMP protocol which does not use port numbers, port numbers are used in TCP and UDP. Htaccess 09:01, 30 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe this answers your question: echo request = ICMP type 8; echo reply = ICMP type 0. Jaho 19:50, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I play battlefield 2 and my average ping is reported as 234. why is this classed as high? because of this i get kicked all the time and is extremely frustrating. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.172.0.154 (talk) 11:32, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yahoo POV?

From the article:

"Yahoo is still fondly remembered by many"

This seems very POV. Why should anyone not remember Yahoo? Afterall, they are still one of the biggest sites on the web. To read this article you'd think they'd gone out of business.

Unless there are objections I'll edit this sometime soon.

Per hop or cumulative?

Is the ping time 'per hop' or cummulative over the entire trace?

Cumulative over all the hops, there and back Htaccess 16:13, 24 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging Yahoo.com

I've never heard this story and I doubt it's value even if true.

It's also partly wrong: Nobody pinged Yahoo in the early 90s, and it wasn't well known then, because it didn't exist until Feb. 1994.

I'd remove this section, but I'll leave that to someone else.

Also -- Akamai wasn't founded until August 1998, so Yahoo's uptime couldn't have been because of any Akamai-related reason in the mid 1990s.

I have removed the whole pinging yahoo.com paragraph as it was clearly full of holes. Ive worked on an ISP helpdesk and never come across this particluar meme. Something could be added about ISP helpdesks asking users to ping a popular website like yahoo.com to test their network connectivity, personally I ask people to ping google.com or cisco.com and I suspect there are many other common ones used by helpdesk staff round the world. Perhaps a section on using ping for network trouble shooting would be better. Htaccess 20:38, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging illegal?

Is it?

Only pings over 65,535 bytes are. See Ping of death. Bakanov 12:50, 28 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, pinging is not illegal. Ping is a regular network testing protocol, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons for people to use it.

Ping packets over 65,535 bytes violate the networking protocols, and the sender is probably up to nothing good, but I don't think they're against the law in any country. By the way, this ping of death problem is historic, it was solved over 10 years ago, it's just the myth that lives on.

Stop worrying about occasional pings in your logs, they're harmless. Jaho 19:16, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Example Ping Usage

here a exapmle of ping usage should it be included in the article? --Deathvader 21:37, 10 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Usage: ping [-t] [-a] [-n count] [-l size] [-f] [-i TTL] [-v TOS]
            [-r count] [-s count] [[-j host-list] | [-k host-list]]
            [-w timeout] target_name

Options:
    -t             Ping the specified host until stopped.
                   To see statistics and continue - type Control-Break;
                   To stop - type Control-C.
    -a             Resolve addresses to hostnames.
    -n count       Number of echo requests to send.
    -l size        Send buffer size.
    -f             Set Don't Fragment flag in packet.
    -i TTL         Time To Live.
    -v TOS         Type Of Service.
    -r count       Record route for count hops.
    -s count       Timestamp for count hops.
    -j host-list   Loose source route along host-list.
    -k host-list   Strict source route along host-list.
    -w timeout     Timeout in milliseconds to wait for each reply.

Simply listing the whole man page is not particularily useful for an encylopedia article. Htaccess 15:50, 12 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

ping is an acronym?

Mike Muuss wrote the program in December, 1983. From his home page: http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html

"I named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired by the whole principle of echo-location."

and

"From my point of view PING is not an acronym standing for Packet InterNet Grouper, it's a sonar analogy."

_Many_ technical exams and such refer to ping as an acronym (Packet INternet Groper, so not even the most correct of them), rather than the actual correct meaning (like Sonar).

I really don't feel anyone has the right to change the meaning of the authors name for the application and I feel that the acronyms for the application should be viewed as an incorrect misconception rather than an acceptable definition. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 204.26.91.162 (talk • contribs) 21:34, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

This may be a case of creating a backronym. People desire the 'reason' for a name and sometimes make up answers. See the article on the computer language Perl for a more explicit example of a backronym. Shenme 18:44, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Packet loss

How about including loss in the article? A real-world example from a few minutes ago would be:

$ ping -c 10 www.google.com
PING www.l.google.com (64.233.183.99): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.233.183.99: icmp_seq=0 ttl=245 time=18.233 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.183.99: icmp_seq=1 ttl=245 time=15.716 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.183.99: icmp_seq=2 ttl=245 time=15.525 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.183.99: icmp_seq=3 ttl=245 time=14.720 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.183.99: icmp_seq=6 ttl=245 time=16.591 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.183.99: icmp_seq=7 ttl=245 time=14.478 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.183.99: icmp_seq=8 ttl=245 time=14.774 ms

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 7 packets received, 30% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.478/15.720/18.233/1.228 ms

(standard Mac OS X ping)

:-( --62.194.128.232 02:55, 25 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

ping as a verb

I was surprised at how little was said of other uses for the word ping. It is now used by a much wider audience than that limited to computer networks. Witness this BBC article on pinging an asteroid, "Prize offered to tag an asteroid" [1] Or even sending a short email to see if someone is available "I'll ping him and see if he's in this week". Hmm, Wiktionary has at least the latter usage. Perhaps a link to Wiktionary would do? Shenme 19:07, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ping (blogging)

There should be a link to Ping (blogging) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jmchuff (talk • contribs) 05:29, 17 January 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Latency/RTT

There is very little discussion of latency/RTT and the factors that influence or cause variance in these metrics. A large part of the usefulness of PING results from being able to understand the measurements based on these factors. A section that details network RTT, queueing delay, congestion based loss, corruption based loss and propagation delay should be included IMHO. 4a6f656c 11:44, 20 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Web based ping tool as a external link

Hello everyone.

I had recently added an external link, which didn't fit its requirements to be added as is. I developed a web site, which I will be including a lot of tools for web/host/postmasters, and as I received a notice from a users of wikipedia and the followed by its exlusion, I was told to come here and discuss if it can be included, if it fits to be included as a external link.

I saw a few external links like mine, so I coulnd't really think of it as a unrelated or off-topic link. Basicly, me intention of adding it to the ping's wikipedia web page, it's to give everyone the hability to do ping from my location to any destination. It's a self-explanatory web site, without advertising and is NON-Comercial one.

I won't re-add the link. But I hope someone does.

Link: http://www.bairestools.com

Someone may say I have a decent english, if so, it's pure luck! :) So, accept my apolgoizes.

Best regards!. Paul. 201.216.206.221 23:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Paul, typoes like "coulnd't" or "apolgoizes" do not convince me, and "Basicly" gives you away as someone with an excellent command of English (see: bartelby.com on basicly, urbandictionary.com on basicly; such "error"s are almost shibboleths; if someone taught you English, (s)he did a marvellous job).

Anyway, I am convinced now you are not just another passer-by who only drops a few links to his/her webpage. On the other hand, I will not re-add the link on ping, because even severly crippled operating systems have their own ping command. On the third paw, I will not revert again, even if you would add the link. Erik Warmelink 22:39, 27 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Erik! Today I had my second english class and your answer was the subect! :)) Well I have some years of english writting almost every day, so I learn some words that could point you to say that, I guess, but your are terrible wrong :)

Ok, sure I'm not that. Anyway as I said my intention is not to breake rules and as I can see you are a good wikipedia contributor, so I don't have any reasons to disagree with you that my web page is not acurrate for this article and won't add it anymore. Thanks for taking the time to answer my posts, it's very much appreciated! Unless your are a lazzy millonaire with nothing to do, in that case, only "thank you!" would fit. (just joking) :). Paul 201.216.206.221 22:09, 30 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Redundancy in section "successful ping"

I think the section "Sample of a successful ping to en.wikipedia.org" is redundant with the prior section "Sample with windows Vista", the screenshot contains no significant additional information. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 15.235.153.101 (talk) 20:05, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Fair use rationale for Image:FailedWikiPingACL.jpg

Image:FailedWikiPingACL.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 05:37, 27 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Payload

To whomever removed my section regarding an ASCII dump of a ping packet, please explain why you removed it. I consider it valid and relavent to the article. 82.44.127.5 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 16:31, 12 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I had confused your xyz editing with vandalism. Looking at the payload section, it is formatted nicely but I don't think the payload is relevant. I'll leave evaluation of it to other editors. -- SEWilco (talk) 18:07, 12 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ok thanks just got a bit frustrated as this isnt the first time my entries were marked as vandalism when they arent.

Thanks for your response. 82.44.127.5 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 15:33, 13 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Title capitization

I'm new to contributing here at Wikipedia so please excuse me if this is the wrong place to ask this. I was wondering why the article title is lower case. My only guess is that it is a command. Is this something of personal preference or a standard? Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Steve D Welsh (talk • contribs) 00:49, 15 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]