How to Ping an IP Address

The PING command is used to test the connection and latency between two network connections. These connections can be either in a local area network or a wide area network or the internet as a whole. The PING command sends packets of information to a specified IP Address and then measures the time it takes to get a response from the specified computer or device.

Steps

Windows XP or Vista

1. Open the command window by clicking START, then RUN. Type CMD, and hit Enter or click OK.
2. Type "ping" in the Command Window.
3. Hit the space bar once.
4. Type the IP or website address that you want to ping. For example, if you want to ping eBay, type "www.ebay.com" after the space. If you want to ping your Router, it might be "192.168.1.1"
5. Hit "Enter." If the website is up and actively responding, you receive replies back from the server that you pinged with the following information:
   • The IP address
   • The number of Bytes sent
   • The time it took in milliseconds
   • The TTL is Time to Live (This indicated the number of "hops" back from the computer pinged from that computers initial TTL value.)
6. Analyze the information. The lower the round trip number in milliseconds, the better. The higher the round trip number in milliseconds, the higher the latency, which may indicate a network problem between your computer and the server you pinged.

Tips

• You can also run a remote PING^[1]. This allows you to ping an IP address or computer from a computer other than yours to see if the problem may be associated with your local connection rather than the IP Address you are trying to connect to.
• There are a number of options when running PING to give different results and outcomes. Type them after the IP address. **-c Count. Send count packets and then stop. The other way to stop is type CNTL-C. This option is convenient for scripts that periodically check network behavior.
• -f Flood ping. Send packets as fast as the receiving host can handle them, at least one hundred per second. This is most useful to stress a production network being tested during its down-time. Fast machines with fast Ethernet interfaces (like SPARCs) can basically shutdown a network with flood ping, so use this with caution.
• -l Preload. Send preload packets as fast as possible, then fall into a normal mode of behavior. Good for finding out how many packets your routers can quickly handle, which is in turn good for diagnosing problems that only appear with large TCP window sizes.
• -n Numeric output only. Use this when, in addition to everything else, you've got nameserver problems and ping is hanging trying to give you a nice symbolic name for the IP addresses. When pinging locally, the -n option is used specify a number of repeats. 'ping ^[2]

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