Small, Sharp Software Tools

Testing Network Connectivity

We’ve all been there. You open a browser and are immediately greeted with a message stating that there’s no Internet access. Maybe you can’t access anything else, or maybe you can access other servers on your network, but you can’t reach the greater Internet. You’ve probably opened a command prompt or a terminal session and typed ping to see if you can reach another machine.

The ping command is the standard tool for testing connections between other computers. It sends a request to a remote machine and waits for a reply. It then displays the reply, along with some useful statistics about the connection. On Unix-like systems, ping sends these requests forever until you press Ctrl+c:

$ ping google.com

Let ...