Testing Network Connectivity With ping

Testing Network Connectivity With ping

The ping tool tests and measures general network performance. It tells you when there is a problem with your network. The most important piece of information provided by ping is the percentage packet loss. Ideally, you want to see 0% packet loss; however, anything under .01% is acceptable. This low packet-loss threshold is required because many network applications transmit large packets. If 0.1% of a packet is lost, the entire packet must be retransmitted. This can cause a network to be saturated by retransmissions.

The following example uses ping in its simplest form, but the information obtained is very useful. The ping tool is testing and measuring traffic between the local station and the station testcase. See the ping(1M) reference page for more details about the many ping options.

/usr/etc/ping testcase 
PING testcase (192.55.43.4): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.55.43.4: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 192.55.43.4: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 192.55.43.4: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 192.55.43.4: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 192.55.43.4: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=0 ms 
----testcase PING Statistics---- 
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss 
round-trip (ms)  min/avg/max = 0/0/0

The percentage packet loss is highlighted in bold. Again, 0% packet loss is the goal. Anything over 0.1% should be investigated further.