Ping Options and Utilities

from the article.............. I feel sorry for ping. Ping has been beaten up, abused, misunderstood, banned and even tossed aside.

Ping was originally used to check if a device was up or down, period. Back in the day equipment failure was very common. I chuckle thinking back at those sales people that used Mean Time Between Failure to sell their equipment. As network analysts, we needed a way to see if our hardware or equipment failed and ping did the trick.

Over the years, SNMP was introduced to aid in network visibility but we still used ping for simple up and down checks. In the 90’s bandwidth limits were becoming an issue so we used ping response time results to determine if a device or link was slowing us down.

In the mid 1990’s the ‘ping of death’ appeared. In summary, Ping was used crash, reboot or otherwise kill a large number of systems by sending a certain amount of payload. This was the first nail in ping’s coffin. Since then, ping and ICMP has been used for floods, attacks and tunneling which led to many system admins to simply block all ICMP.

Back to troubleshooting, where ever possible, I still use ping since there are many things we can figure out to aid us in resolving issues or conducting an application baseline. The first point to make is that all ping tools are created equally. I always keep my eyes open and test new utilities all the time. I also test utilities to ensure they work as advertised. Regardless if the software is free or paid, it should work as advertised. Packet loss will affect your application negatively as much as latency will.

for the whole article, go to https://netbeez.net/2017/08/02/ping/ ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7zyujb_LqQ