What is PING

by Yogi P - September 4, 2023

What does PING stands for?

Have you ever wondered about the PING full form? Well, it’s an important acronym in networking, and also when it comes to tech troubleshooting. Let’s dive deep to learn all about it.

The term PING stands for Packet Internet Groper. It was created in 1983 by Mike Muuss of the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory. He was the originator of the original ping program, which later evolved into a more useful version for network troubleshooting.

How Does it Work?

Ping works by sending special types of network packets (typically ICMP) to different computers on the network. When those packets are received, the receiving computer sends a response back to the originator of the packet, which is the ping’s source.

These packets also allow the ping source to determine the distance and round trip time taken for the packet to reach the destination computer and back.In the world of networking technology, this is extremely useful for purposes such as identifying issues with network connections, as well as determining which connected computers are “live” (running).

Ping Command

The ping command is a utility used to check the connection between the computer placing the ping and the computer it is pinging. It is mostly done with the use of the command line in Windows and Linux, but there are graphical user interfaces available for it too.

For example, if you type ping google.com in the command line, it will send four packets (by default) of data to Google’s server and wait for a response. It will then show you the response time of the packets and how many packets were sent and received.

This makes it easy to analyze the network connection and troubleshoot any problems that may exist. Pinging can also be done to test a connection to a specific port, for example, when a server is inaccessible or an application is not working.