Command line tip #10- Check your Internet connection with “ping”

Posted by Vic Laurie
March 10, 2008

I previously noted that there are a number of commands that can help with checking out a home network or a broadband connection. There are more details at commandwindows.com/tcpiputil.htm but here’s an example of using the command “ping”. Suppose you are having trouble with connecting to the Internet. Is it your connection to the Internet that’s the problem or your connection to the local network/router? Ping can help you find out. Ping sends out a packet to a designated address and measures its response time. The target will return (hopefully) a signal. For example, you can “ping” Yahoo by entering “ping yahoo.com” into the command line. (Not everybody will accept pings. For example, don’t expect any response from Microsoft.) If Yahoo responds, you know you are connected to the Internet. If you get no response, you can check if you are connected to your local network by pinging the local IP address assigned to the router or “gateway”. The local gateway IP address will be something like 192.168.1.1 or a similar group of numbers. So you would enter “ping 192.168.1.1″ in the command line. If you get no response, then your problem is that you are not connected to the local network (or your router isn’t working).

How do you know what the local gateway IP address is? That’s in the next command line tip. Stay tuned.

Command-line, Networks

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