Ping Monitor is a desktop gadget for Windows that can monitor up to five local or remote servers. As the name suggests, it pings the servers in intervals specified by the user of the application. (I suggest you read through Ryan’s excellent Network Troubleshooting Basics: The Ping Command if you need to refresh what you know about the ping command).

All information are presented then as a graph and in averages on the Windows desktop.

Configuration of the sidebar gadget may be somewhat confusing. Download it from the developer website and install it as usual. It should work out of the box under Windows Vista and Windows 7, I have tested it under Windows 7 Pro and it worked without problems.

When you first display the gadget it does not monitor a domain, IP or server. Right-click the interface and select Options.

Up to five different urls or IP addresses can be added to the gadget. Ping Monitor supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Enter an IP address or domain name in the first field, and an alias that is used to identify it in the second. The alias is shown on the main interface which is better than displaying IP addresses for instance. Still, you can select to use the domain name or IP address as the alias as well.

Make sure you change the default ping frequency from 1 per second (!) to another value. I suggest you switch to minutes or even hours instead.

Click on the 3 tab afterwards. Here you can change the size of the gadget. The default size was to small for my taste, and I changed that to 200% for a better view at the stats.

You can also make changes to colors and the graphs under the other tabs in the configuration.

The gadget displays the maximum, average and current ping time as well as the number of errors while pining the server or IP address.

The graph visualizes those findings. You can ping a server manually with a click on the update icon next to the server’s alias.

Ping Monitor is a handy gadget for Windows users who want to use the ping command to monitor websites or servers. The ping command is not as sophisticated as other server monitoring means, for instance by performing checks if a database is running on a server.

Users who prefer an application instead of a gadget can take a look at Nirsoft’s Ping Info View instead which is also compatible with Windows XP.

One of my networking classes included the basics of troubleshooting a network connection. It included basic command line tools that really were very easy to use and understand. Most of the students thought they were fun to use.

Knowing these commands before having to deal with the frustration of a network connection problem is not a bad idea. A working connection shows you what is supposed to happen. If you see something different, you will know something is up. When problems strike, at the least you can get an idea of what is going on.

Step 0: Check the Cords & Power

The first thing you should always do is check to make sure everything is plugged in: your computer, router, device, etc. Many laptops have a button to turn off the wireless connection; the icon looks like a signal tower. When in doubt, read the manual (which you can often download from the manufacturer’s website). Bear in mind, we all forget this step at some point, so do not feel too silly when it happens to you.

Step 1: Ping Yourself

You want to test that your machine is working properly. To do this, you want to ping yourself. You use the loop-back address (127.0.0.1) to do this. Pinging the loop-back address tests to make sure software on your computer is working properly. Typically, if something is not working at this stage, you may just need to restart your computer.

ping
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/12/network-troubleshooting-basics-the-ping-command/

Step 2: Ping Your Router (AKA: the Default Gateway)

The next step would be to ping your router. You can find your router’s IP address with ipconfig as well (it should be on the bottom of the unit and listed in the manual too). Remember that ipconfig lists your router as the “Default Gateway.” It is very likely to be 192.168.1.1 or a similar number.

This is done to test if your router is responding. If it is not, and you have already checked to make sure it is on, then it may need to be turned off and turned on. Every once in a while it may need a refresh. If the problem continues, contact you ISP for assistance to see if they can help.

Note: Routers, like anything else in the IT world, will someday fail. There is a chance that this has happened. Your ISP help desk should be able to help you determine this. If the router is one of theirs, they will likely send you out a new one.

Step 3: Ping Yourself with Your IP Address

We want to test to make sure everything is working correctly between your router and your computer. To do this, ping your IP address. It is listed in the ipconfig command at the same time the router IP number is. If this works, you can be pretty confident that a problem is outside your home (or maybe small office) network.

Step 4: Ping and Tracert Outside Your Network

From here, you want to test something outside your network. In a medium or larger network setting, a server on another branch of the network will do. For a home network, the Internet is often your only option. Since chances are the problem is that one or more websites are (or seem) down, this is a logical thing to check.

You can use a few different tools. First try the ping command because it is the fastest. It will only tell you if the site is working or not. For more detailed information, use tracert and pathping. They can give a better idea of what is going on. For instance, if you can reach your router, but no further, the node that connects you to the Internet may be down: an ISP issue. If you can reach only a couple (one or two) steps past your router, then it still is probably an ISP issue. Your Internet is down. If you can reach a lot further, the site may be having issues (see is Facebook down, ways to check if a website is really down, for pointers) There even is a chance that other sites, either from the same proximity or even hosting service, are having the same problem. If it is an e-commerce site, there may be a number to call, but there probably is not much to do besides wait. At least you know where the problem is.

Parting Thought

On a parting note, one other benefit of trying these commands out on a nice day like today is that it creates a positive mental association with the tools. That might change with enough problems, but they are worthy of a good first impression. Having the skills to deal with a problem ahead of time is always a good idea.

Overview

Knowing the basics of network troubleshoot can help you find out where problems are. It could be your computer, your home router, your ISP (Internet Service Provided), the website itself, or something in between. First each tool will be looked at individually and then the process with be explained. The tools used will be the commands ping, ipconfig, and tracert. The process that will be covered is one of the most basic ones.

• Step 1: Ping yourself with the loopback address.
• Step 2: Ping the router (default gateway) and how to get that address (ipconfig).
• Step 3: Ping or tracert outside the network (e.g. the Internet).

The Ping Command Basics

The ping command got its name from the sound sonar makes when it “sees” something. In sonar, you send out a signal and measure the time it takes to get there. The ping command does the same thing. This tells if a computer or device is out there or not, which is the purpose of the command.

To use the ping command, you type “ping” followed by an IP number or a website name. It will show you if a destination is reachable and how long it takes to get there. It will work in Windows from the Dos Box, Linux from the terminal, and Mac from the terminal (or the Network Utility).

Click on the “Start” button > “run” > and type in “cmd” & enter to bring up the command line.

Type in ping ghacks.net and hit enter (there is a space between the two g’s).

The Loop-Back Address

Step 1 in the process is to ping yourself. To do that, we use the loop-back address. This is a special IP number, 127.0.0.1, and is useful in checking your own computer. When you ping this IP number, you ping your computer to test if the system is working. It is an internal process. If this does not work, you know the problem is in your computer. In this case, you may simply need to reboot the machine, but it could be a more serious issue.

Type in ping 127.0.0.1 and hit enter (there is a space between the “g” and the “1″).

Exceptions to the Rule

When it comes to websites and servers, not all of them will let you ping them. For example, Microsoft’s website will not show up if you ping it, but Google will. These sites, while working, will give you a “Request timed out.” error message.

How can a website show up on your browser and not on the ping command? The Internet works using a system of standard instructions called protocols, TCP in a website’s case. The ping command works with another protocol called ICMP. The main use for ICMP is to test connections and find out where a problem is. It is supposed to send back information to the sender letting them know if the message was received. If you turn off ICMP, then ping will not work. A firewall is usually used to do this.

In school, when we tried to ping classmates; this was a problem. With the firewall on, we could not ping each other until we turned it off. That is not something you should do at home, but it can explain why you cannot ping a computer on your home network. If you do decide to try out something that requires turning off your firewall (not recommended), unplug your router from the Internet and do not plug it back in until your firewall is running again.

Ping Command Options

The ping command will try to reach site four times by default. Personally, I think twice is enough. You can limit the number of times by using some switches. Switches are extra text you include with a command to tweak what it does.

• In MS Windows, use ping -n 2 destination
• In Linux, use ping -c 2 destination
• On a Mac, use ping -c 2 destination

Some people think once or thrice is enough, so feel fee to swap that 2 for a 1 or a 3. There are more options too, but this is what I find useful. You can always type “ping” by itself to see all the options (in dos, ping /? works too). Tip: If you are using Linux, and the ping command just keeps going, use ctrl+c to stop it.

Closing

The first step is to ping yourself. The next step is to ping your router. To do that you need to know how to use the ipconfig command, which will be covered in the next article.

Enter Auto Speed Tester, a freeware for Windows that can run Internet speed tests regularly on the system.

The core interface of the software program has a few issues, like buttons that do not show up at first or button text that is not displaying correctly on the button. Those are minor issues but things the developer should fix to turn the application into a professionally looking software.

New users need to click on the Configs button in the main interface to configure the application before first usage. The configuration can also be opened via Menu > Configuration.

The three important configuration pages are download, upload and Ping/IP. The download test files are configured in the download tab. A pulldown menu next to the Main Test File url opens a list of suitable speed test files, ranging from 1 Megabyte to 1 Gigabyte in size. You should pay attention to the country extension to pick a location next to your physical location. This is unfortunately the only indicator of a test file’s location in the world.

Nothing needs to be configured under the upload tab, unless you want to switch from uploading to the default ftp server to another ftp server. You need to enter the ftp server IP or hostname, user name and password in that case.

The Ping and IP tab runs ping, packetloss, jitter and IP lookup tests. The test server for the commands can be modified here, and specific tests disabled if you do not want to run them.

Auto Speed Tester runs the selected tests once every 60 minutes. You can change the interval in the main program window.

All previous Internet speed tests are displayed here as well. You see the date and time, download and upload speed in KB/s, the ping and if you scroll vertically the packetloss, jitter and the public IP assigned to your computer or device.

A chart on the right displays the same values, averages at the bottom right show the all time best performance, and the best performance of the month, week and day.

You can send the program to the system tray where it will run the tests in the background. This reduces the program’s memory footprint considerably. You may notice speed drops due to those tests when you work with the computer. But since it usually does not take longer than 30 seconds to complete the tests, it should not interfere with work to much.

The core benefits of the program are that it runs Internet speed tests over time, and that all tests can be customized.

Interested users can download the latest version of JackDinn’s Auto Speed Tester from the developer website. The program is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit client and server editions of Windows from Windows XP to the very latest Windows 7.

And if the ping fails, other tools like tracert are there to provide deeper information on the connection issue.

Ping Info View is a Nirsoft application, which means it is a lightweight portable program for the Windows operating system. The free software can ping multiple host names and IP addresses in selected intervals.

The software displays the Ping Options window on first startup that contains a text area where the user can add host names and IP addresses to ping. Available as well are configuration options including the ping timeout in ms, the interval in which pings are fired of from the local PC and whether the host names and IPs should be remembered by the program.

Once the configuration has been finalized the data is transferred to the main interface of the application where all servers are pinged automatically.

The portable software displays the host name and IP address, the reply IP address, the number of successful and failed counts and the failed percentage. It furthermore indicates non responding host names or IP addresses with a red icon, and responding servers with a green icon.

The initial configuration window is available under File > Ping Options so that new servers can be added to the list, or old ones removed. It supports the import of a server list from a text document which can be handy for users who need to ping many servers that are stored in a text document.

Ping Info View offers to create HTML reports and save selected information in text files. The program is available for download at the Nirsoft homepage. It should work fine with most Windows operating systems. Ping Info View was tested on a Windows 7 64-bit Pro system.

With the help of the GNOME Nettools you can have a sweet collection of powerful tools that will help you to troubleshoot your network in no time. And this collection of tools is all wrapped up into a user-friendly graphical interface. So without any further adieu, let’s take a look at this powerful suite of tools.

Features

The GNOME Nettools includes the following tools:

• Devices: Have all information about your networking devices at your fingertips.
• Ping: Get detailed information using the ping tool.
• Netstat: Get detailed information about your routing table, active network services, and multicast information about your machine.
• Traceroute: Trace the path to a network host.
• Port scan: Scan for open ports on servers and desktops.
• Lookup: Get detailed information about a server.
• Finger: Lookup a users finger entry.
• Whois: Lookup a whois entry for a domain.

GNOME Nettools also features:

• Copy information to text report.
• Help system.
• Drop downs for previously entered addresses/domains.
• Easy to use GUI.

Now let’s take a look and see how this tool is used.

Usage

Figure 1

As you can see there has been no mention of installation. That is because GNOME Nettools is installed by default. In order to start up the tool you only have to go to the Administration sub-menu of the System menu. Once you have fired up the tool you will be greeted with main window at the Devices tab. This tab is where you gather the information about your installed networking devices. As you can see (In Figure 1) there is plenty of detailed information about my default eth0 interface. You can switch this to display information about any connected internet device you have on the machine by using the Interface drop-down.

The next tab, Ping, is where you can actually start troubleshooting networking issues. Ping is almost always one of the first tools I use, but I generally use it in command line form. Since most new Linux users prefer to not use the command line – you can still get your ping on with Nettools. Click on the Ping tab to reveal how the Ping tool works (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

By default the Nettools Ping tool will be configured for a limited 5 requests. You can up that number or even change it to an unlimited number if you need. In Figure 2 I have sent 5 ping requests to an internal server and received 100% sucess on my packets. I know this server is at least responding.

The other tools will all work exactly as you would expect them. One thing that is nice is as a tool is working you can switch over to another tool without disrupting the original tools task. This is especially nice when running a traceroute that can take a while (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

The traceroute tool will follow a path, hop for hop, to a destination you enter. In Figure 3 I ran a traceroute on www.google.com which ended before it reached its goal. This, of course, was only to show you the output of the traceroute (as there is not much I can personally do if my route to www.google.com is stopped outside of the boundaries of my network or my service providers network. But it gives you an idea of where the route stops. If this were a corporate issue, and the destination was one I had to reach, I would know precisely where the last known successful hop was (in the case of Figure 3 – after the 65.222.158.82 address).

I can then use the Whois tool to discover who is connected to that address. By clicking on the Whois tab and then entering the IP address above I receive the following information:

MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business UUNET65 (NET-65-192-0-0-1)
65.192.0.0 - 65.223.255.255
SPLICE COMMUNICATIONS, INC. UU-65-222-158-80-D4 (NET-65-222-158-80-1)
65.222.158.80 - 65.222.158.87

If www.google.com were a critical address for me (and my company) to reach for work (or a host of my company’s web site) I could at least contact the owner of this domain.

Final thoughts

As you would expect, the rest of the Nettools tools work in a very similar fashion than their command line counter parts. The only difference? You don’t have to open up a terminal window to use them. No commands to remember, no commands to type. Just easy network analysis, with the help of a user-friendly GUI tool.

The first section will display information about the blog’s responses. This includes checking the web server’s IP, RSS feed, robots.txt file, web caching and search engine indexation in Google and Bing. The second section will display technical details about the blog which are mostly interesting to the webmaster of the website.

The technical details will display page generation and fetch times, transfer speeds, information about compression as well as the version of the blog software and the theme used.

The site links to three additional services that can be used to check out a website or blog. This includes HTML verification at W3c, feed validation at Feedvalidator and HTTP header checks at redbot.com.Is My Blog Working is a great way to quickly check various technical details of a blog. A bookmarklet is provided that can might also come in handy.

Internet Maniac combines a set of networking tools in its interface. The portable software provides access to functions like traceroutes, pings, host lookups, whois information, lookup IPs or domain names and more. Every option is directly accessible from the main interface.

A click on an option will usually display a second window that can be used to enter data, say a domain name for Whois. The same window will also display the results of the function directly in its window.

The tool is completely portable and requires less than 5 Megabytes of computer memory. The homepage of the developer has been deleted a long time ago. You can download the latest available version of Internet Maniac right here at Ghacks (internet maniac).

One major problem is the reliability of those speed tests on the Internet. Some show lower speeds even if the Internet connection is able to handle faster speeds. This can be due to server capacities at the speed test host, the location of the servers in the world or general routing problems that affect the measured speed.

Speed.io is the first broadband speed test on the Internet that measured the speed of an Internet connection correctly. Every other speed test was usually missing a few thousand Kbits. The service measures the download and upload speed, the maximum number of connections and the response time of the Internet connection.

The download speed test result was 14806 Kbit and the result of the upload speed test was 990 Kbit which comes close to the maximum capacities of the 16 Mbit / 1 Mbit advertised speed of the Internet provider.

The developers of Speed.io claim to utilize 50.000 servers world wide for their speed tests which seems an awful lot but would be an incredible infrastructure if this was the case. Still, it does not really matter if they have 1 or 50K servers as long as the speed tests are accurate.

Most operating systems have those tools on board and it is normally not required to use an external tool. Many users however do not like to work with the command line in Windows and prefer a graphical user interface instead. Many also have difficulties issuing the correct commands, e.g. finding out how to save the result in a text document automatically.

eToolz is a collection of network and Internet tools that provides a graphical interface for several common commands. This includes ping and tracert but also DNS and whois lookups, mail checks, the retrieval of http headers, time synchronization, pagerank check and list with useful information (default ports, domain extensions).

Most functions come with several options. It is for instance possible to select one of six whois databases, define timeouts, ping counts or the maximum amount of hops of a tracert. Every echo in the program can be copied normally. Five languages are supported: German, English, French, Portuguese and Dutch although a few of the information are still not translated and therefor in German.

The developer of the product uses Google Translate to provide an English version of the homepage, ever heard of Nazi lookups ? Yeah, me neither.

This Firefox tip does not require a plugin, add-on or Greasemonkey script. All you need to do is create a new bookmark of the url: http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=%s. Now all that is left to do is to add the keyword ping to the service when you add it as a bookmark.

The keyword command is a way to access an url without typing it. The good thing about is that you can pass parameters. If you want to ping a server you enter ping url in the address bar of Firefox, e.g. ping ghacks.net.

Firefox will recognize the ping keyword and load the url http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=ghacks.net which displays the ping on the website.

You can do the same in Opera. The keywords are named nicknames there but are basically the same. I have not tested it but it should work fine. Let me know if you try that out.

Checking if a website is up or not should be speedy, you do not want to waste your time analyzing large log files if there is another faster way to accomplish the check. This article is therefor concentrating on methods that reveal results in a matter of seconds which are easy to interpretate.

If you know of a method that is missing let me know and I will check it out and add it if it makes a good fit. On we go with ways to check if a website is really down.

1. Ping

A ping basically sends an Hello to a server waiting for an response. If the response takes to long a timeout will occur. Ping is measured in ms, if it is incredibly high something is wrong with either your computer, the route in between or the destination.

The command is similar in Windows and Linux, just enter ping destination, with destination being an IP or domain name, and wait for the response.

One of the many online scripts that ping servers is located at Ping.eu. It offers other network tools like Traceroute and a port check as well.

2. Traceroute

You can compare Tracerouter with a list of all the roads that you travel until you reach your destination. Only that the roads are the servers in this case that your data is send through to reach their destination. If everything is fine the destination server should appear at the end, if it is not you could get timeouts for instance.

Traceroute Tool from the University of Princeton displays the traceroute between the University and another server on the Internet, you can enter the IP or domain name of the server.

Tracert is the command that you can use in Windows to trace the route between your computer and the destination. Use the command “tracert IP” or “tracert domain” to achieve this. Traceroute is the equivalent in Linux.

3. Domain Name System (DNS)

DNS errors most of the time occur when a website is freshly registered or moving to another server. It usually takes some time to update the DNS records to point at the new server. DNS is providing information much like your phone book is. Domain names are for us puny humans who have troubles remembering those server IP addresses (64.233.161.18 for Google for instance). Problems occur when the Nameservers who translate the human entered domain names into IP addresses have still the old IP in their records while the website is already up and running on the new IP.

You can use the online script DNS Report to receive a detailed report. Green results are fine, red ones point to failures and yellow ones are warnings.

4. Proxies

Proxys can be used to establish connections to websites even if the direct route from your computer to theirs is somehow blocked. You can compare that to visiting a friend and using his computer to connect to a server that you cannot connect to. If it works it is somehow related to your computer or connection.

You can find hundreds of web based proxies at Proxy.org. Try some and see if you can connect to the website.

5. Ask someone

If you have direct contact to other users, be it in IRC, Skype, Instant Messengers or even forums, you can ask them if they would be kind enough to check a particular website for you. That`s practically a substitute to using a proxy.

Here is a short list of all the other tools mentioned: Nmap, Nessus Remote Security Scanner, John the Ripper, Nikto, Superscan, pof, Ethereal, Yersinia, LCP, Cain and Abel, Kismet, Netstumbler and hping. Make sure you check the tools that you do not know about yet, it might be worth it.