What IS Ping And How It's Work?

What IS Ping And How It's Work?

Ping is a type of network packet that is used to check if a machine that you want to connect to over the internet is available or not. A ping is a network packet termed an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packet. The process of a ping is done when a machine sends an ICMP echo request packet to another machine or interface over the internet. If the receiving machine is available and is enabled to reply back, it will respond with an echo reply packet.

This not only shows us that the receiving machine is alive and working, it also helps us to identify a number of things such as total time taken, loss of packets, etc that are used to judge the reliability of the connection.  To run a ping from your Linux machine, you will need to open a terminal and write a command. The syntax of the command is “ping destination_ip” – replace “destination_ip” with the actual IP address of the machine you want to connect with.

All recent versions of Windows and Linux come enabled with the ICMP command. On Windows, the command will send 4 echo requests before stopping while Linux will continue sending echo requests until a user stops it themselves.