Ping Away Your Internet Woes

The good news is, there's a free, easy-to-use utility you can use for this job. It's ping.exe. Ping.exe is the Internet's adjustable wrench. It is the de facto troubleshooting and analysis tool for anything and everything having to do with the public and Private Internet and IP.

Ping comes with every version of Microsoft Windows, with the exception of the very earliest version of Windows 95. On the rare occasion that you have a customer who is running this old Windows 95 version, Ping can be downloaded quickly from a CD or the Internet itself.

Ping is incredibly versatile. It's probably the main reason that IP and the Internet emerged as the winning network protocol. No other discovery protocol provides the same type of information, in as concise a fashion. Ping is so versatile that it can actually factor in the speed of light -- 186,000 miles/sec. -- when testing the connectivity between inter-continental IP links located thousands of miles from one another. Ping can also uncover a problem with an old telephone cable which may need to be changed by your local phone company.

Ping can provide a world of information to the white-box builder concerning the overall health of the customers' Internet connection. The collection and interpretation of this information is the basis for this recipe.

How Ping Got Started

While Ping.exe itself is a small and unglamorous program, millions of dollars have been spent by large software-development companies on building utilities based on the humble Ping.

For example, HP Openview, the best-known network-analysis software system, relies on Ping.exe for its network-discovery and troubleshooting processes. When large ISPs such as Verio or AOL add new locations to their network or need to analyze a failed location, they use Ping,or a utility built around it,to identify customers' problems and fix them. It's likely that Ping is used billions of times per year by network engineers around the world.

Ping was written by Mike Muuss, who, sadly, died in a car accident in 2000. However, his memory lives on in the ongoing health of the public Internet. Muuss wrote Ping as a "thousand-line hack" (his words) for Unix. Ping uses timed IP/ICMP Echo Request and Echo Reply packets to probe the "distance" to the target machine. What this means is that Ping can actually measure the time needed, in milliseconds, for a packet of data to make the round trip from a PC to a remote server and back.

Now for the good part.

Q: How can Ping help your customers?

A: The power and simplicity of Ping will let you analyze the health of your customers' Internet service, be it AOL, Verio, AT&T, Earthlink, or any other service provider. It doesn't matter who, Ping works with all of them. If you believe that there is a problem with your customers' Internet service, or if you just want to observe the general quality of their service, then Ping is your thing.

Here are two of Ping's main capabilities:

Troubleshooting a flaky Internet connection. If a customer complains about "dropouts" or overall lousy service, Ping can be deployed to hunt down and locate intermittent failures. System builders can win points with customers by locating a fault of Verizon, Roadrunner, AOL or Cablevision, thus becoming part of the solution, not the problem.

Proof of delivery-of-service. If a customer is angry because they believe they're not getting the bandwidth they're paying for, Ping, when used in concert with PC Pitstop, will prove out the bandwidth. PC Pitstop is a popular site that offers free online PC utilities and information. It's an excellent place to test just about any function of a given PC, PC components, or Internet service.

A savvy system builder can make extra money in both these ways. In a sense, Ping is a terrific aid in giving up the "real story" of determining the exact health of the Internet service. No other program in the world has this capability, because Ping was designed directly into the fabric of IP. Other Internet Analysis programs which provide a GUI are usually higher-level applications that essentially regurgitate the information gathered from Ping.

So now you're ready to use Ping to do a full analysis of your customers' Internet service, and get the real story. Let's dig in.

Ping Ingredients

You don't need much to get started with Ping. In fact, your customer most likely has everything that's needed:

• Executable Ping.exe file. This file is included with all versions of Microsoft Windows, except for very early versions of Win95. Still, it's a good idea to check for it. In Windows XP, it's normally found under the Windows System 32 folder. In other versions, it's found in a subfolder under Windows or winnt.
• Capability of command (DOS) prompt.
• Connection to the Internet (either broadband or dial-up).

Ping, Step-by-Step

1. Click on Start in the lower left corner of the screen. Then type Command in the box, as shown below. Then hit Enter.

2. You will now see the Command Window, as shown below. There will be a prompt with a flashing cursor to the right of the prompt. Depending on how the PC is set up, the prompt may look different. Most likely it will read as Windows. In any event, you should be able to type text above the cursor to the right of the prompt. Type in:

ping rippt.com -n 8

You don't have to use "rippt.com," but a generic domain must be put here. Feel free to use yahoo.com, google.com, or something else. I put my own here as a placeholder. But note, if you type in the domain of the customer's local ISP or domain name, you will not get a great stress test. That's because it's simply a local ping to the ISP or, even worse, a customer-hosted server. In the latter case, you'll be analyzing nothing other than the customer's intra-office wiring, which generally is problem-free.

OK, now hit Enter.

3. As Ping.exe starts doing its job, it sends eight "hello" signals to my server at rippt.com. In the screen shot below, eight individual replies are shown to the initial running of Ping.exe. This hello signal is actually a small file that contains the address of your PC, requesting a hello signal back from rippt.com (or whatever generic domain you've used). As the screen-shot below shows, rippt.com sent replies back to the host PC.

Note: "Ping rippt.com -n 50" will send 50 hello signals. You can set this value as high as you like. I once tried 10 million, and it worked!

Take a careful look at each reply message below:

Reply from 69.42.72.67: bytes=32 time=56ms TTL=51

Reply from 69.42.72.67: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=51

Reply from 69.42.72.67: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=51

Reply from 69.42.72.67: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=51

Reply from 69.42.72.67: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=51

Reply from 69.42.72.67: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=51

Reply from 69.42.72.67: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=51

Reply from 69.42.72.67: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=51

The time parameter ("time =") in each reply message is most important. It provides all the useful information you will need to determine what you want to know. You may wonder what is meant by 56ms, 16ms, or 37ms. These values refer to the time needed, in milliseconds (thousandths of a second), for the hello signal to make its round trip from the test PC to the generic domain (in this case rippt.com) and back.

4. Write down the time values for your Ping. Then use the table below to figure out what they mean.

5. To close the Command Window at any time, just type Exit.

Note: When running Ping.exe you may get "Request Timeout" messages instead of the replies shown above. If this happens, a problem exists. Call your ISP to investigate.

The screen shot below shows some free Internet speed tests. You should run a few of these tests after making sure that Ping.exe reports back to you that your DSL or cable line is clear of problems or static. You can find these tests on the PC Pitstop site.

Using these tests in conjunction with Ping will tell you definitively that the Internet provider is providing the bandwidth that your customers paying for.

DAVID KARY is the founder and CEO of rippt.com. He has no commercial interest in any product or vendor mentioned in this Recipe.

Did you try this Recipe? If so, how did it work? Visit TechBuilder's Recipe Forum, and share your results with more than 2,400 other registered system builders..