How should I ping my website?

Whenever You go on Live chat support with your queries regarding your website, you'd do some basic investigation, which surely helps to resolve your website issue with lightning speed.

Lets gather following information prior to initiating Live Chat support..

1)ping report from your website..

Ping is a OS tool for network testing. To test your domain/website is reachable to the server where it is hosted; whenever you ping on the command prompt, you'll get response from it, which contains, sending ICMP “echo request” packets to the hosted Server and listening for ICMP “echo response” replies got from the hosting server. From this report, you can calculate the round-trip time required (msec), shows any packet loss, and provides a statistical report once done.

Now lets see, how will you provide the ping response when Technical support executive asks for the same,

For Windows operating system users,

click on start >> run >>will get a small window >> type cmd >> hit Enter, will get command prompt like C:\> here you need to type ping yoursite.com like

C:\>ping yoursite.com

Pinging yoursite.com [192.168.0.1] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.0.1 bytes=32 time=140ms TTL=244
Reply from 192.168.0.1 bytes=32 time=140ms TTL=244
Reply from 192.168.0.1 bytes=32 time=140ms TTL=244
Reply from 192.168.0.1 bytes=32 time=140ms TTL=244

Ping statistics for 192.168.0.1

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 145ms, Maximum = 160ms, Average = 150ms

provide this output to the Technical support executive for further investigation.

For Linux OS users:

login to your server >> terminal >> here you can fire the ping command

root@server [~]# ping yoursite.com

For MAC OS users:

Click on Hard Drive >> Applications >> Utilities >> Terminal

ping yoursite.com

Syntax :

PING [options] destination_host

Options:

-w timeout = Timeout in milliseconds to wait for each reply.

-i TTL = Time To Live.

-v TOS = Type Of Service.

-a = Resolve addresses to hostnames.

-n count = Number of echo requests to send.

-t = Ping the destination host until interrupted.

-l size = Send buffer size.

-f = Set Don't Fragment flag in packet.

-r count = Record route for count hops.

-s count = Timestamp for count hops.

-j host_list = Loose source route along host_list.

-k host_list = Strict source route along host_list.

destination_host = The name of the remote host

[php_rules]

Just to expand on this a little - you can use ping to test a lot of network related problems - say you cant get any connection at all - this could be a problem with your network card, your tcp/ip stack, your nettwork cable, your modem / router, your phone line, your ISP's network or, indeed the website that you are trying to connect, there are a lot of things that can go wrong =)

This is the method that I use to check someone's network when they tell me 'my internet isnt working' (I try not to tell them that the internet is not their internet, but it always falls on deaf ears...)


first,
ping 127.0.0.1
this is the ip address of your actual computer (its the IP address of everyones computer and cant be accessed from inside) if the ping returns ok then your TCP/IP stack works.

the next thing to do is to find out the ip address of your network card,

ipconfig (or ifconfig on linux)

this will tell you the ip address for your network card, ping that ipaddress.
if it returns ok, then your network card is working.

next ping your gateway (from the information in ipconfig)

if this works then the connection is good from your network card to your router.
next thing to do is to ping your nameservers (these are the machines that translate google.com into an ip address)
if they return good, then you have a proper working connection to the net.
test it out by typping

nslookup google.com

it should return ipaddresses that are for google.
the next step (if you cannot reach a website is to traceroute it (tracert on windows, traceroute on linux)

traceroute mywebsite.com

this will show you the ip addresses of each machine in the link from your machine to your web site.
hopefully you can tell the network administrator that their router is down and they need to go fix it =)

[tigress]

Isn't this the same as the repair button in the Local Area Connection Status menu in windows? Whenever I experience network connection problems, I just click on the repair button and it tells me what is wrong with my internet connection. It also shows the details of my internet connection such as IP address, Subnet Mask (whatever that is), Default Gateway, etc.

[centelo]

My favourite is the ip flush (which seems to happen sometimes for one reason or another).

So what about places like ipchicken dot com are they even worth it or is it always best to check your own first?