What is Ping or Pinging?
Ping is a computer command that you can use to check if there is a connection (reachability) between two devices.
The name comes from active marine sonar terminology that sends a pulse of sound and listens for the echo to detect objects underwater.
When you “ping” a device you are asking your PC/device to send data (known as packets) to another device to check if there is connectivity between the two.
The ping command will tell you if the destination device is reachable.
This is a good tool to check if you have connectivity to a device or website.
By Pinging a website, you are checking if you have connectivity to the website and at the same time checking if your broadband is working.
You can ping an IP address, hostname or website address (e.g Ping google.com).
Every internet-enabled device (e.g PC, laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc) has a unique IP address.
How to Ping
PING, is a diagnostic tool that tests connectivity between devices.
In this example, you will be checking if your device has connectivity to google.com.
If you don’t have connectivity to google, this would indicate a problem with your home broadband connection as that is the route your PC would take to connect to google.
On a Microsoft Windows PC
Press the Windows key+R on the keyboard and then click OK on the box that appears.
This will bring up the Command Prompt tool.
Type ping www.google.com
On an Apple Mac
On an Apple Mac go to the ‘Network Utility’ app, choose ‘Ping’ and type ‘www.google.com’
How to Ping and Check your IP address configuration on a MAC
Understanding the results from a PING test
This is an example of a successful ping
Example of a failed Ping #1
Error message ‘Ping request could not find host‘ means that there is an issue with your DNS service.
Your DNS server is not translating the website name to an IP address and therefore your device does not know the IP address for google and cannot ‘talk’ to it.
Devices communicate using IP addresses and a DNS server translates names to IP addresses. DNS tells your device that the website you are trying to communicate to, (www.google.com in this example) has the IP address of 173.194.36.99 and therefore if you want to talk to google.com send your comms to 173.194.36.99.
Example of a failed Ping #2
As you can see from the output screenshot above, the DNS is working because the device is able to translate google.com into an IP address (173.194.36.99) but cannot connect to google.com.
Possible causes of this ping failure:
- Problem with your internet connection
- The end device/website may be down (unlikely in this case as Google has resilience and is rarely down)
- The end device (when pinging a device), may have a firewall that is blocking your PING probe
- An issue on your network (e.g some sort of routing problem)
- Check that you can ping your default gateway to make sure that the problem is not internal