How to RUN a Ping Test?

Ping (How it works and why it is useful for diagnosing network problems):

If you have ever had problems with your connection, the safest thing is that, either on your own initiative or at the suggestion of technical service, you have resorted to a network utility known as Ping, implemented by default in the vast majority of operating systems. The purpose of ping is to determine if a destination host, identified with a specific IP, is accessible from another host.

To do this, the source host sends a 32-byte information packet to the destination host using the ICMP protocol and awaits a reply from it, which must contain the same data. If the answer arrives correctly, the ping has been satisfactory. If on the contrary, the ping fails, then it is that either the request of the source host or the response of the destination host has been lost along the way. But how can we use this command from our computer? How can we use it to determine what the problem of our connection might be?

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How to ping:

To ping another host from a computer with Windows operating system, it is as simple as following these steps:

1. Open the command console: To do this, go to Start >> Run and type cmd. In more recent versions, just go to Start and type in Search programs and files. Next, press enter.

2. Write “ping hostname or IP address”: Now a window with a black background will appear. In it we will write, for example, ping www.google.com.

If everything went well, something similar to the following will appear in our command window:

What do these lines mean? Well, the ping confirms that it has sent four packets of size 32 bytes to the server that we have selected, in this case www.google.com, and that server corresponds to IP 74.125.130.147. In this case the ping has been satisfactory, the four test packages have arrived correctly and have returned to our computer with an average time of 182ms.

To prevent a ping request from traveling unlimitedly over the internet, a Time To Live (TTL) is established in each of them, which represents the number of hops that the host-to-host package has taken over the internet until it reaches its destination. In each jump, the TTL is decremented by one unit, and if at any time it reaches 0 then the packet is discarded and the host returns an error to the origin.

Ping is a very simple command but also with several options to customize the results. For example, if we want not only 4 packages to be sent, but to be sent continuously, it's as simple as adding a -t to the end of the line (ping www.google.com -t). You can see all the options available in the following table.

How to diagnose the problem:

As the main the objective of ping is to see if a certain computer or server is accessible from another, it is a very useful tool when diagnosing problems in a given network. Suppose, for example, no web page loads us. This can be due to several reasons, for example, if our local network fails, if the DNS servers that we are using are down or if, directly, what fails is our internet connection.

Using the ping command it is easy to rule out possible sources of error. First, if we see that our connection is not working properly, it is best to ping a generic server, such as the one we used before as an example (ping www.google.com). If you return any of the four packages and not others, it is surely something temporary. However, if everyone returns rejected or if the ping is not done directly, then there is a problem with our connection.

What we can do next is to verify that the fault is not from our local network. To do this, we ping the IP address of our router. This address is usually 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1, but you can easily obtain it if you write ipconfig in the command console and look for the address of the gateway. If we ping the router and it is satisfactory, then our computer has access to it and works correctly.

What more bugs can we have? Well, for example, the DNS (which is responsible for translating domains to IPs) that we are using may not work correctly. How can we detect it? Very simple: we ping a domain, for example www.google.com, and it gives us an error. On the other hand, if we ping your IP address (for example, at IP 74.125.130.147) and it works correctly, then it looks as if the fault may be in the DNS.

Of course, when using the ping command you have to keep something in mind: not all servers accept it and many routers cut these types of requests for security. That is why if we ping a server and it returns an error, it may also be because it does not implement it. The best thing, in these cases, is to test with the servers that we know that Yes they respond to the pings without any problem.

Traceroute, another alternative:

Finally, we will explain another network utility quite similar to ping and also quite curious. This is the traceroute that, in addition to sending a package to a a destination such as pinging, shows the route that it follows, including other information of interest such as the time it takes for each jump and the hosts it visits to reach the destination. To use this command on Windows, it is as simple as typing in the tracert command console www.google.com, or the destination host, we want to use.

An advantage of traceroute over ping is that, if there is a failure in communication, we can know at what time it occurs and on which particular host. Both, both traceroute and ping, are two simple commands to use but they return very valuable information that can help any user to know the status of their connection and the reasons why it may be failing.