PING Finally Exposed

For the Blackberry addicts among us PING needs no introduction.  We have used PING and we have been PINGED or should I say PANG in fairness to the English Language.  I bet you don't have a clue what PING is much less how it works or why it is used. I bet you are not interested to know what it is; But you will be surprised how much you gain from this bit of Discovery.  Lets go on a journey

PING is primarily used in computer Networking as a utility to check the availability of another computer or host in an IP network.  By IP Network we mean the regular internet as we know it. PING therefore allows the sender to decern the availability of a host computer or device.  It also measures the time it take for the message to reach the destination and back to the sender - known as the round trip time.  In addition, it records how many packets are lost in the process.

In the BBM world PING basically does the same thing.  It checks how long the data takes to get delivered. It is also a way of testing the synchronicity of your conversation in blackberry messenger. For example, if your ping is 1000ms or one second it means your're receiving messages one second too late.  PING on Computer (IP) networks are of the order of a few Milli-seconds.  The Blackberry Network may use the IP network or a mixture of both IP and GSM or other mobile systems.

The name PING derives from sonar terminology and was first introduced in 1983 by Mike Muus.  According to Muus it was named after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired by echo-location.  Dolphins I believe navigate by echo-location making sharp clicking sounds that return after hitting their target.  The characteristics of the return signal provides information for the Dolphin to interpret. 

Bats are also adept users of this technique. It was found out in the 1930s that bats use high pitched sounds like a natural sonar to locate food and navigate. When these sounds bounce off of objects bats are capable of listening to these echoes and are able to judge distance, movement and size of all objects in their path.

Many Network professionals like to make an acronym of the term PING, calling it Packet INternet Groper.  Muus definitely did not like this, and has been known to disambiguate this "bacronym" as he calls it.   

PING uses a Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo requests to the target host and waits for an ICMP response. The results of the test is displayed in summary with information such as the Round trip time, minimum, maximum and mean times including the lossed packets.

PING has been know to have malicious uses as with almost every good thing in computer networking.  The most common of this is a denial of service attack which is akin to a PING flood where the attacker floods the victim with ICMP echo requests packets overwhelming the host.  

Some hosts have been known to filter out ICMP echo request in the form of PING, sighting the possibility of security threats.  We recall the popular internet worm Welchia which used PING request to find new computers to infect.

Despite the long history and the cons associated with PING it remains at the top of Network troubleshooting.  It is the first port of call, the 911 of computer networks and the screams of the BBM messengers. 

For more on the PING utility you can visit The Story of the PING Program