Shopsmith Forums

beeg wrote:You do it at a command prompt. Just type in "ping shopsmith.net". The desired result is a "reply".

Thank you, beeg. I did not know that you could ping the site name (shopsmith.net). I have always pinged an IP address (24.123.75.51).

I just noticed that pinging either shopsmith.com or shopsmith.net brings the same result BUT I think I know that shopsmith.net can be down while at the same time shopsmith.com is operational.

Ed in Tampa wrote:Thanks
I gave it a try and got a reply.
Not sure I know what that means, I'm guessing that proves the site is avail?

Ed, it shows two things. ONE: Your ISP is working and TWO: Whether or knot the site your pinging is receiving the ping. By sending a packet of info to the object being pinged.

"Ping'' is one of the most useful network debugging tools available. It takes its name from a submarine sonar search - you send a short sound burst and listen for an echo - a ping - coming back. "

ping response just means that a physical server is plugged in, turned on, connected and responding.

Whether or not a site is up or down is a function of the web server. The physical server could be up and running but the site still be down.

Don't get me wrong, ping is a very valuable tool for diagnosing connectivity issues and latency (The amount of time it takes to get a response) issues. It will NOT however definitively determine if a website is up or down.

Only that you can connect to the physicals server.

dusty wrote:Thank you, beeg. I did not know that you could ping the site name (shopsmith.net). I have always pinged an IP address (24.123.75.51).

I forget the term. But Shopsmith.net is the readable characters of people. 24.123.75.51 is the computer readable numeric. BOTH are the same destination.

Dusty
To further the idea, a ping is just a little program that sends a packet to an IP address and the machine assigned may or may not respond to it.

By Pinging a host name (shopsmith.net) you are doing two things. The first is that a DNS (Domain Name Server/Service) server responds by looking up the IP assigned to the host name, then the ping program does it's thing.

The only Kabosh is that some servers do not respond to a ping request. It is how many hackers find servers on the Internet, and then try to exploit them. If the server doesn't respond, their searcher bots just moves on and that server that doesn't respond simply gets skipped over.

Just a heads up, if a server responds, great, if it doesn't, it may be set to just not respond to a ping request .....

Dick