BRL

You may need to defrag(ment) your hard drive.

DBTL - a fundimental question and I should know the answer! How do you PING a site? And what am I looking for?

I had a bit of software on a previous computer which would show the routing of a link to a site - is this connected and if so, can you remember what software I'm talking about?

Thanks for the help...

FJJP,

Ping.exe is built into the OS, as part of the TCP/IP protocol.

Run, Cmd, PING hostname or IP address. e.g. ping www.pprune.org or ping 213.161.73.143. You can see all the command switches by simply typing ping. Generally you don't need any, although -t and -a can be helpful.

What are you looking for?

Well, if you ping a hostname and it resolves to an IP address, then it is likely that DNS is working correctly (assuming you haven't got the address in a local hosts file).

Second, if you get a response it shows that you have a physical connection to the host you are pinging, so your network is set up and working OK. If you don't get a response, it may simply be that the host is not responding, rather than indicating a problem. For this reason, it is useful to have one or two addresses (e.g. www.pprune.org, www.bbc.co.uk) that you know DO respond.

Third, you can see the response times - on a local network (your PC to your router) the response should be < 10ms. On the internet anything under 200ms is not unreasonable, over 500 is getting bad.

The default in Windows is 4 ICMP Echo requests (pings). You may see that not all get through, indicating that the connection is poor.

SD

Saab, TVM. Useful for me, especially as I have developed a home network problem - at least it will remove or confirm connectivity from the fault resolution.

FJJP

If you are speaking of tracert, then it is related to ping - they are both part of the ICMP - Internet Control Message Protocol suite - that is built-into every implementation of TCP/IP that I am aware of.

It shows the interfaces that are traversed by a ping packet from your PC to the remote host.

Try tracert www.pprune.org to see what you get.

Again there are various command-line switches that you can use to tailor it to your need of the moment.

You might be talking about something altogether more advanced, such as Virtual Route or similar. These are commercial products that add lots of additional functionality and GUI interface to the ICMP stuff. For example, VR can show you a map of the world with your PC and the remote host and all intervening hops marked by their position - obtained by querying the WHOIS databases maintained by RIPE and IANA and those responsible for managing the allocation of physical IP addresses.