Hello,
I’m troubleshooting some connectivity issues with a few remote devices and wanted to verify if our websites are reachable. We have our own websites running algorithms on these remote devices, and I want to check their connectivity. I searched online and saw the ping command might help. Could someone explain how to use it and what the results mean?
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The ping command is one of the easiest and most reliable tools to test whether a website or a network host is reachable.
Here’s how you do it:
On Windows, open Command Prompt and type:
On macOS or Linux, open Terminal and do the same.
The command sends a series of small data packets AKA Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo Requests to the website’s server. If the server is reachable, you’ll get back ICMP Echo Replies along with the response time in milliseconds.
For example:
Received from 93.184.216.34: icmp_seq=1 bytes=32 time=20ms ttl=58
This means the website responded in 20 milliseconds, a pretty healthy connection!
Actually, these numbers can tell you quite a lot.
A lot of people don’t realize some websites intentionally block ping requests for security reasons. So, if you get a timeout, it doesn’t always mean the site is offline.
Ah, that makes sense. I just tried ping google.com and it’s replying fast, but when I tried pinging a couple of internal websites, they timed out. Guess those might be blocking ICMP or behind firewalls.
Exactly. For internal sites, that’s quite common. Think of ping as your first checkpoint. If ping fails, you know there’s a network path issue. If it passes but the website still doesn’t load, then the problem is probably with DNS, the web server, or a firewall rule.
In enterprise setups, ping is essential for quick checks on device or server reachability. It really helps streamline the troubleshooting flow. In my experience, the simplest tools are often the best for the job!
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