A series on network monitoring at Linux Journal continues this
week with a look at some less glamorous informational tools: ping
and etherape.
One of the things I tried to do in the last column was
show that we shouldn’t forget the basic tools that come with our
systems. Many of those great flashy programs use these tools
somewhere beneath their shiny surfaces–why shouldn’t we do the
same? We’ll get flashy soon enough; right now though, I would like
to look at a couple of other, less glamorous, network monitoring
tools, and show you some of the power they possess. Then we’ll do
some flash, I promise.Okay, you all know about the ping command. The official purpose
of ping is to send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to remote hosts. The
name comes from radar pings sent by submarines to detect other subs
or ships underwater. In its most basic form, ping lets us know
whether a remote host can be reached. If I wanted to see whether
www.linuxjournal.com was up (other than doing it the smart way and
using a browser), I might use the following command:$ ping -c 4 www.linuxjournal.com