ping[1]
command to check reachability of various hosts on your nearby region of the
Internet and elsewhere. If you're using Unix/Linux, investigate the many
command line options which can be used to customise the operation of
ping. If you're not on Unix, there are versions of
ping for virtually all combinations of hardware and
operating system. For example, on most MS Windows systems, a version of the
ping command can be accessed through the "Run" menu.
traceroute command is available on our on-campus
Unix and Linux systems, as well as for PCs and Macs. Use
traceroute (judiciously -- see its documentation). NB:
there are quite a few other software utilities which perform the same function
as traceroute, but have a different name (eg, I know of
one called "tracert" and another called
"whatroute"). See what you can find on the various free
software repositories.
netstat. This command examines the OS kernel memory and
displays the values of various Internet-related variables. Try a few of its
command line options. The most interesting are probably
netstat -C and netstat -r.
Can you make sense of the display, and the various options? [1] It usually lives in either the
/usr/etc or /sbin directory, which may
not be in your path. If you get a "Command not found" error of some kind, try
typing the full pathname, for example: /usr/etc/ping. You
could also alter your shell startup file to add the appropriate directory to
your default path.
