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Ping
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the IP network utility. For other uses, see Ping (disambiguation).
Main page
Contents Ping is a computer network administration utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet
Featured content Protocol (IP) network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host
Current events to a destination computer. The name comes from active sonar terminology.
Random article Ping operates by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request packets to the
Donate to Wikipedia target host and waiting for an ICMP response. In the process it measures the time from transmission
Interaction to reception (round-trip time) [1] and records any packet loss. The results of the test are printed in
Help form of a statistical summary of the response packets received, including the minimum, maximum,
About Wikipedia and the mean round-trip times, and sometimes the standard deviation of the mean.
Community portal Ping may be run using various options (command line switches) depending on the implementation
Recent changes that enable special operational modes, such as to specify the packet size used as the probe,
Contact Wikipedia automatic repeated operation for sending a specified count of probes, time stamping options, or to
perform a ping flood. Flood pinging may be abused as a simple form of denial-of-service attack, in
Toolbox
which the attacker overwhelms the victim with ICMP echo request packets.
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Contents [hide]
Languages
1 History
2 ICMP packet
Català 3 Sample ping test
Česky 4 Message format
Dansk 4.1 Echo request
Deutsch 4.2 Echo reply
Eesti 4.3 Other replies
Ελληνικά
5 Payload
Español
6 Other types of pinging
Euskara
6.1 In gaming

Français 7 See also

Galego 8 References

한국어 9 External links

Bahasa Indonesia
Italiano History [edit]
‫עברית‬
ქართული The ping utility was authored by Mike Muuss in December 1983 as a tool to troubleshoot problems in
Latviešu an IP network. He named it after the sound pulses of active sonar, which also involves sending a
Lietuvių signal and measuring the time until any echo is received.[1][2]
Magyar The usefulness of ping in assisting the diagnosis of Internet connectivity issues was impaired starting
Македонски in 2003, when a number of Internet service providers began filtering out ICMP Type 8 (ICMP Echo
Request) messages at their network boundaries.[citation needed] This was partly due to the increasing
Nederlands use of ping for target reconnaissance, for example by Internet worms such as Welchia that flood the
日本語 Internet with ping requests in order to locate new computers to infect. Not only did the availability of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping[26-02-2011 22:02:09]
Ping - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Polski ping responses leak information to an attacker, it added to the overall load on networks, causing
Português problems for routers across the Internet.[citation needed]
Română
However host discovery or ping scanning or ping sweep is still a part of network scanning tools like
Русский
nmap, as it may give basic evidence about the existence of a remote machine.
Slovenčina
Suomi Although RFC 1122 prescribes that any host must accept an echo-request and issue an echo-reply
Svenska in return, this has been characterized as a security risk.[3]

[edit]
Türkçe
Українська
Tiếng Việt
한한

Checksum (16 bits), calculated with the ICMP part of the packet (the header is not used). It is

the Type field[5]

The ICMP 'Quench' (32 bits) field, which in this case (ICMP echo request and replies), will be
composed of identifier (16 bits) and sequence number (16 bits).
Data load for the different kind of answers (Can be an arbitrary length, left to implementation
detail. However must be less than the maximum MTU of the network [citation needed] ).
Data Transportation

Sample ping test [edit]

The following is a sample output of pinging en.wikipedia.org under Linux with the iputils version of
ping:

admin@localhost# ping en.wikipedia.org

PING rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org (66.230.200.100) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org (66.230.200.100): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=87.7 ms
64 bytes from rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org (66.230.200.100): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=95.6 ms
64 bytes from rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org (66.230.200.100): icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=85.4 ms
64 bytes from rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org (66.230.200.100): icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=95.8 ms
64 bytes from rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org (66.230.200.100): icmp_seq=5 ttl=52 time=87.0 ms
64 bytes from rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org (66.230.200.100): icmp_seq=6 ttl=52 time=97.6 ms
--- rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 8998ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 78.162/89.213/97.695/6.836 ms

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping[26-02-2011 22:02:09]