Testing Network Connectivity

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

The ping command

The ping command is the standard tool for testing connections between 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 we press “Ctrl+c”:

ping google.com

Let’s let it run and receive four requests. Then, we press “Ctrl+c”.

To tell ping to stop after four requests, we use the ...