From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jan 8 07:28:27 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id HAA15373 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 07:28:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [192.216.222.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id HAA15367 for ; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 07:28:23 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id HAA24753 for ; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 07:27:57 -0800 To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Using `ping' to diagnose network connections reasonable? Date: Mon, 08 Jan 1996 07:27:57 -0800 Message-ID: <24751.821114877@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk I'd like to add some code to sysinstall which will attempt to `diagnose' a link before accepting the configuration parameters, catching a lot of adapter misconfiguration and incorrect data errors that sysinstall misses now (to fail less gracefully later). My question is whether or not `ping' is a reasonable way to measure connectivity between your host and the gateway & dns machines. Is it reasonable to assume that if a host supports forwarding or DNS queries, it will also answer pings? What if you've got pings blocked somehow but allow DNS traffic through? I wouldn't want to flag a host as `unreachable' when in fact it would have worked fine for its intended purpose! That would be worse than no error checking at all. Thanks! Jordan