To test networks, you will need to understand the “ping” command. It is one of the key tools when setting up networks. In essence, it allows you to check whether two systems can talk to each other. The names comes from active sonar, where a ping sound is send and an echo is received.
Ping is a command line tool and it is available on most systems. Options are different between the Windows and Linux tool. Common to all is the command ping and the ip address that is being pinged.
The tools sends a ICMP datagram to the host. The host sends the datagram back and the sender can determine the time the datagram took to propagate through the network. The command output reports the round trip time and any lost packets.
Alexander A Kist