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.
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