Recently saw a blog post on netstat , so I tough that if someone could blog about netstat I can blog about ping.  #insidejoke

First of all,  ping is a windows/unix command used to check connectivity between to points using ICMP protocol, but that’s not all you can do with it.

Disclaimer:  Many networks block ICMP, so this may not help you in any way.

First let see our options:

As you can see there are a lot of options, but lets test three (3) of the most common ones.

Check connectivity to target
c:\ping 8.8.8.8

Check for DNS resolution on target
c:\ping -a 8.8.8.8

Manipulate TTL,  lets check the third (3rd) hop on a route to target
c:\ping -i 3 8.8.8.8

So let’s be creative with it:

Traceroute & check 30 hops
For /L %n in (1,1,30) do @ping -n 1 -i %n 8.8.8.8 | find “Reply”

Do a ping sweep discovery on a /24 subnet
For /L %n in (1,1,255) do @ping -n 1 192.168.0.%n | find “Reply”

Now we can do  a reverse DNS walk
For /L %n in (1,1,255) do @ping -a -n 1 192.168.0.%n | find “Pinging” && 192.168.0.%n

So now you see how an everyday  “insignificant” command can be of very much use.

In unix we have more tools available to manipulate strings and with the power of Bash more so.  But in essence you can do the same. I will cover this in a future post.

jq2106