Hi Bruce,

When I first saw this week's essay assignment I thought to myself, “Why is he asking us to research Microsoft's new search engine?”

It's the eyes that go first.

I've been a pingmeister since the advent of OS X. Previous operating systems on the Mac didn't offer sophisticated network utilities, as I recall. It was always a 'PC' thing. I’m pretty sure that it wasn't until OS X with its UNIX underpinnings that Mac users were able to do all the cool pinging, fingering, tracerouting and other netgeek pursuits. At RISD I normally will use Ping if I’m unable to connect to any of the public servers available to faculty, staff and students, or if there are problems with the printing system. I like the GUI of the Network Utility, but I suppose Terminal does the job just as well. Although, my recent experiments with Ping have showed some anomalies with both utilities. I've been able to successfully ping some domains using Network Utility but not with Terminal, and vice versa. More on that later. 

My Ping project for this essay involved three domains: google.com, allsparks.com (the web home of my favorite band of all time, Sparks) and your oworld.org. I was interested in documenting any differences in connection and speed while pinging these domains both at RISD and at home, wired and wireless. At home, I'm on Cox Cable, either connecting to my cable modem via ethernet or wirelessly through my Belkin wireless router. At RISD I'm connecting via the ethernet on what I am told is a pretty fast backbone–a line we share with Brown (not sure of the actual specs). The wireless connection is pretty spiffy as well. 

Here are the Ping roundtrip speed statistics for allsparks.com after ten attempts:

RISD wired (avg) 4.5ms
RISD wifi (avg) 5.0ms
home wired (avg) 26.6ms
home wifi (avg) 27.2

Here are the Ping roundtrip speed statistics for google.com after ten attempts:

RISD wired (avg) 14.3ms
RISD wifi (avg) 15.1ms
home wired (avg) 94.5ms
home wifi (avg) 96.3ms

Here are the Ping roundtrip speed statistics for oworld.org after ten attempts:

RISD wired (avg) 86.0ms
RISD wifi (avg) 87.2ms
home wired (avg) 108.7ms
home wifi (avg) 110.9ms

I found it interesting that the roundtrip connection speed was very close whether I was pinging from a direct ethernet line or wirelessly. Also worth noting is that oworld.org pings at almost the same speed from RISD or home, but with the other two domains there is more of a difference in speed.

As I had previously mentioned, there are domains which I can ping using Terminal but not Network Utility, or the opposite, although that doesn’t make much sense and may be simply explained by network issues. I find also that there are domains which will not successfully ping at all. I wonder if there is a firewall involved or some sort of software filter. I’m unable to ping my own domain www.maohaus.com, but at the same time I’m able to open up the homepage on my browser (even emptying the cache to insure a fresh page is served).

Once I finished my speed tests I started experimenting with the options available when running Ping. First I added the -c to have Ping send count packets and then stop. I can see this being a valuable option if I didn’t want to ping indefinitely. However none of the other options seemed to do anything. I attempted -n, for numeric output only, -p for Pattern, a string of hexadecimal digits to pad the end of the packet with, -s to change the size of the test packets, and -v for verbose output. Maybe you can clear this up for me.

After further research I see that some Ping options are only available for in the Windows environment.

So, after using the Ping utility and my subsequent research of the network tool I’m gaining a broader understanding of what is going on under the hood. To wit, I’ve learned how Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) works within Ping, using the Echo Request and Echo Reply messages. 

My web wanderings then took me to the author of Ping, Mike Muuss, who unfortunately died in a car accident almost a decade ago, but his webpage remains online. He describes how he came up with the concept from an offhand remark by a colleague who was working on a program using the measurement of path latency using timed ICMP echo packets. Looking for something to help troubleshoot intermittent IP networks, he devised Ping. He also relates an interesting anecdote about a systems administrator who was trying to troubleshoot an intermittent Ethernet connection. He linked the Ping program to a vocoder, played it through his office stereo, and wiggled Ethernet cables until the vocoded ‘Ping” voice stopped.  

And thus ends my investigation into the Ping utility.