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Using Ping on a Mac

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[fa icon="pencil'] Posted by Lewan Solutions [fa icon="calendar"] September 30, 2015

Being a long time Microsoft Windows user, I was surprised to find out a fun feature of Apple Mac's terminal command--ping.

If you are not familar of the ubiquious tool, on most systems it is a way to send a simple ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packet to network hosts.  In plain English, it means you can send a small network message to a node on the network and it will reply back.  Depending on the legth of time between the send and the reply you can figure out rough network performance.

Here is the familar interface on Windows:

ping on Windows

By default on Windows, ping will send out 3 packet requests then stop.  If you would like to have continous ping request you can type the following command:

ping -t 192.168.1.1 

On a Mac, you have a couple of extra options.

By default, every ping on a Mac is continous.

You can ping a node on the network and have it make an audible beep everytime it gets a successful reply.  This is very useful if you want to verify a machine is still up and running while doing other tasks.

ping -a 192.168.1.1

ping on Mac

Conversely, you may want to get an audible beep only when a server is NOT responding.  This is very handy if you have requested a server to reboot after installing updates.  The audible and visual cues make it easy to pin point exactly when the reboot occurs.

ping -A 192.168.1.1

Depending on which system you are using, there are many other options you can run while using ping but these are a couple I find useful while using a Mac.

Drop me a line in the comments if this is useful to you or if you have any questions,

Brian Olsen @sagelikebrian

 

To read additional posts by me use this link:

http://www.lewan.com/blog/author/brian-olsen

 

 

Topics: Apple, Microsoft Windows, Networking

Lewan Solutions
Written by Lewan Solutions

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